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John London, ed. Theatre under the Nazis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Pp. 356. $74.95 casebound; $35.00 paperbound.
Theater machen (literally translated: "to make theater") is a German expression used to condemn children and adults who make a fuss or put on a show. The idiom is sometimes used in jest. The carefully researched and well-documented essays in Theatre under the Nazis are not written lightly, though. The introduction by John London and the six essays that follow offer striking insights into the nightmare theater directed by that frustrated artist Adolf Hitler and produced by the many would-be dramatists urging on skillfully choreographed spectacles highlighted by musical processionals, torchlight parades, banner waving, dancing, and ritualistically triumphant speeches offered to eager audiences who were also part of the production. "The overlap between theatre and political life" was strikingly indistinguishable, London notes (30). Apparently, wide audiences thrive through theater, and Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) was not only a heady slogan but a fact in a deadly drama that lasted between 1933 and 1945.
Hitler's theater was to be Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft ( The Artwork of the Future) that would endure for more than a thousand years. In fact, the millennial drama turned out to be lethal kitsch, while the actual theatrical productions within the grand theater still continue to elicit wide-ranging reactions. As London indicates, "Popular perceptions of theatre under the Nazis swing from one extreme to another. On the one hand, there are those who condemn everything official to do with the period. On the other, there is a general view that theatrical life under Hitler was largely untouched by the ugly violence of Nazi ideology" (1).
For the first view, I can offer an example of "those who condemn everything" by translating a sweeping statement made by Thomas Mann in his essay "Why I'm Not Returning to Germany" (1945): "It might be superstition, but, in my eyes, books printed from 1933 to 1945 in Germany are less than worthless....They all stink with blood and shame and should be destroyed" (Die Grofie Kontroverse [ 1963], 33). Apparently Mann was not thinking about his first two Joseph novels (Die Geschichten Jaakobs and Der Junge Joseph), published in Berlin in 1933 and 1934; and he...