Abstract
‘Those were glorious times, indeed, when The Merchant of Venice could still be staged by a Jewish director as a colourful fairytale!’2 — Thus Wilhelm Hortmann introduces a 2003 review essay on recent German productions of the play. The reference, of course, is to the lavish interpretations that Max Reinhardt offered during the first decades of the twentieth century.3 Expressing the yearning to return to an assumed lost innocence, Hortmann’s remark — or sigh — provides a glimpse of what has been at stake in the German reception of The Merchant of Venice since 1945. It stands as a strong, if hesitant, corroboration of Markus Moninger’s observation that the play ‘has been offering a stage for the drama of German post-war society’s dealings with Auschwitz’.4 As a consequence, Shakespeare’s problematic comedy has served various functions and has been viewed from different angles, appearing respectively as a text damaged by history, as a vehicle for confronting history, and as a means of bypassing history. In this chapter, I explore recent productions of The Merchant of Venice in German theatres, focusing on the work of directors who were born during the 1960s and who may thus be considered representatives of a ‘third generation’ in relation to the period of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Where do their interpretations fit within the play’s loaded reception history? How do they operate within the present moment of mnemonic transition, when — six decades after the end of the Second World War and the termination of the Holocaust — Germany is about to cross the threshold towards a full-fledged ‘memory culture’, that is, towards a discourse of remembrance which will be characterized by the absence of living testimony as well as by the dominance of culturally mediated, and often fictionalized, narratives of National Socialism and the Holocaust?
The essay emerges from a research project headed by Sabine Schülting at Freie Universität Berlin. Under the title ‘Shylock und der (neue) “deutsche Geist” — Shakespeares Der Kaufmann von Venedig nach 1945’, the project investigates the reception of The Merchant of Venice in Germany after 1945 in terms of cultural history, reception history and theatre history. See http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/v/shylock/
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Notes
Wilhelm Hortmann, ‘Wo, bitte, geht’s nach Belmont? — Über ein Dilemma von Inszenierungen des Kaufmann von Venedig nach dem Holocaust’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 139 (2003): 217; my translation.
Markus Moninger, ‘Auschwitz erinnern: Merchant-Inszenierungen im Nachkriegsdeutschland’, in Das Theater der Anderen: Alterität und Theater zwischen Antike und Gegenwart, ed. Christopher Balme (Tübingen: Francke, 2001), 229–30; my translation. Moninger’s claim that the immediate post-war era was characterized by a marked reticence in staging the play needs to be qualified in the light of closer historical scrutiny. On the reception of The Merchant of Venice in Germany after 1945, see also: Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, ‘Shylock auf der deutschen Bühne nach der Shoah’, in Shylock? Zinsverbot und Geldverleih in jüdischer und christlicher Tradition, ed. Johannes Heil and Bernd Wacker (Frankfurt/M.: Fink, 1997), 261–80; Anat Feinberg, ‘Vom bösen Nathan und edlen Shylock: Überlegungen zur Konstruktion jüdischer Bühnenfiguren in Deutschland nach 1945’, in Literarischer Antisemitismus nach Auschwitz, ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Klaus Holz and Matthias N. Lorenz (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 263–82, and ‘The Janus-Faced Jew: Nathan and Shylock on the Post-War German Stage’, in Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945–2000, ed. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 233–50; Wilhelm Hortmann, ‘Excursus: the problem of Shylock — Zadek, Tabori and others’, in Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 254–62; Jörg Monschau, Der Jude nach der Shoah: Zur Rezeption des Kaufmann von Venedig auf dem Theater der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1945–1989 (Diss., Heidelberg, 2002) — published online (2003), http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/3530/; Sabine Schülting, ‘“I am not bound to please thee with my answers”: The Merchant of Venice on the Post-War German Stage’, in World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (London: Routledge, 2005), 65–71; Sigrid Weigel, ‘Shylocks Wiederkehr: Die Verwandlung von Schuld in Schulden; oder: Zum symbolischen Tausch der Wiedergutmachung’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie (Sonderheft), 114 (1995): 3–22.
The Merchant of Venice has traditionally been among the more frequently performed Shakespeare plays in Germany. In terms of intellectual importance, it used to be rivalled only by Hamlet. While it might easily be assumed that, due to its potentials as a staging ground for anti-Semitic rhetoric, the play was a favourite ideological vehicle during the Nazi period — thus, e.g., John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 294) — statistics (see the annual reports in the Jahrbuch of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft) show that the number of performances actually decreased with the beginning of the ‘Third Reich’. On the ambivalent attitude of National Socialist theatre towards The Merchant of Venice, see Rodney Symington, The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2005), esp. 244–51. For an overview of the play’s performance history in Germany from the nineteenth century to 1945, see Andrew G. Bonnell, Shylock in Germany: Antisemitism and the German Theatre from the Enlightenment to the Nazis (London: Tauris, 2008).
The first German-speaking production after the war apparently premiered at Basel’s municipal theatre in September 1945. Cf. Thomas Blubacher, Befreiung von der Wirklichkeit? — Das Schauspiel am Stadttheater Basel 1913–1945 (Basel, 1995), 311; qtd in Hortmann, ‘Wo, bitte, geht’s nach Belmont?’, 217–18.
The differentiation of ‘kommunikatives Gedächtnis’ (social or communicative memory) and ‘kulturelles Gedächtnis’ (cultural memory) was introduced by Aleida and Jan Assmann. See Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher, eds, Kultur und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1988); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: Beck, 1999); Harald Welzer, ed., Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung, 2nd edn (München: Beck, 2008).
On the German discourse of remembrance, see, e.g.: Norbert Frei and Sybille Steinbacher, eds, Beschweigen und Bekennen: Die deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft und der Holocaust (Göttingen 2001); Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen (München: Beck, 2005). On the problematic implications of Downfall for Holocaust memory in Germany, see Zeno Ackermann, ‘Der Untergang und die erinnerungskulturelle Rahmung des Zivilisationsbruchs’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 58.3 (2007): 148–62.
Micha Brumlik, ‘Jenseits der Schwelle: Auschwitz im 21. Jahrhundert’, Newsletter zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust — Informationen des Fritz Bauer Instituts 27 (Herbst 2005): 12; my translation.
A joint production of the Austrian ORF and the West German WDR, Schenk’s and Kortner’s Merchant of Venice was filmed in late 1968 and first broadcast on 2 March 1969. This premiere was accompanied by an extensive TV discussion, featuring among others Günther Grass, Peter Stein, and Hartmut von Hentig. Originally meant to contain the precarious potentials of Kortner’s risky performance, the discussion reveals various forms of latent anti-Semitism as well as profound ideological helplessness. On Kortner’s role as a Jew in the German theatre before and after National Socialist rule, see Richard D. Critchfield, From Shakespeare to Frisch: The Provocative Fritz Kortner (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2008).
See Peter Reichel, Erfundene Erinnerung: Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (München: Hanser, 2004), esp. 215–48 (on Hochhuth’s Stellvertreter and Weiss’s Ermittlung). Reichel thinks that during the 1960s the theatre propelled the transition from an ‘Entwirklichung’ (de-realization) to a ‘Politisierung’ (politicization) of the past (23–5).
Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus/Neue Schauspiel GmbH, Spielzeit 2007/2008 (programme overview) (Düsseldorf, 2007) 35; my translation.
For twentieth-century German approaches to Shylock as an (imaginary) Jew, see in particular: Bonnell, Shylock in Germany; and Feinberg, ‘The Janus-Faced Jew’. An intervention in the discourse is offered by Mirjam Pressler ‘“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”: Der Jude Shylock als Theaterfigur, als Mensch, als Vater’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 137 (2001): 11–22. The major general investigations into the history of Shylock as a stereotype of Jewish alterity are: John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992); Toby Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961); and Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1960).
Aleida Assmann, ‘Response to Peter Novick’, GHI Bulletin 40 (Spring 2007): 38.
Elmar Goerden, ‘Der Andere: Fragmente einer Bühnengeschichte Shylocks im deutschen und englischen Theater des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Theatralia Judaica: Emanzipation und Antisemitismus als Momente der Theatergeschichte: Von der Lessing-Zeit bis zur Shoah, ed. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 129–63.
Elmar Goerden, ‘Nathan findet nicht statt’, Lessings Traum von Nathan dem Weisen: Collage mit Passagen aus Nathan der Weise und Der Kaufmann von Venedig, sowie modernen Texten von Elmar Goerden, programme of the production (Stuttgart, 1999), 5; my translation.
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Ackermann, Z. (2013). At the Threshold — Remembrance and Topicality in Recent Productions of The Merchant of Venice in Germany. In: Brown, S.A., Lublin, R.I., McCulloch, L. (eds) Reinventing the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319401_10
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