Department of German and Dutch

Modern & Medieval Languages

Department of German and Dutch

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Paper Ge 15

Modern German Cultures of Performance

MML Part II

This paper draws on the key role that the German-speaking world has played in the development of cultures of performance over the last century. It explores theories and practices of performance in different media - theatre, film, television, dance, sport, visual and performance art - investigating their specific character and the relationships between them. The paper will be particularly concerned with how modes of performance mediate, and mediate between, aesthetic and ideological questions, across a dramatic period of political and cultural history. Students will be encouraged to address topics like the performance of history or gender on stage and screen. The legacy of Brecht, as the most significant pioneer of twentieth-century performance on the stage but also a key influence on performance on screen, will form a major focus for the paper. Other leading figures to be discussed will include: film directors of international stature from Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, and Leni Riefenstahl, to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Wim Wenders, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; pioneers of dance and physical theatre from its Weimar heyday to the doyenne of contemporary Tanztheater Pina Bausch; theatre directors Claus Peymann, Christoph Schlingensief, or Peter Zadek; and Edgar Reitz, director of the multipart series for television, Heimat.

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Course guidance

The paper will draw from a pool of ten modules (as listed below). Four of these will be active for teaching and examining in a given year. Each of the standard modules will be taught through three hours of lectures (or a combination of lecture and seminar format) during the Michaelmas and Lent terms. There will also be a series of three lectures at the beginning of the course, devoted to a consideration of theories and practices of performance, both in general and in particular relation to the media of theatre, dance, film, and television. There will be a single session to coordinate revision in the Easter term.

Students taking the paper will be expected to attend all the lectures or seminars. Two supervisions will be given for each topic. As illustrated in the specimen paper, the examination will include two questions for each of the four active modules, and students will be required to answer three questions in total, covering three modules. Supervision can also be offered for optional dissertations on relevant topics.

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Topics

In 2013-14, there will be lectures on topics 10 and 4 in the Michaelmas term, and on topics 7 and 9 in Lent.

1. Weimar Dance and Physical Theatre: Expression, Entertainment and Politics

This module addresses the multi-facetted forms of dance and physical theatre which played a prominent part in Weimar urban life. Set between high culture and popular or mass entertainment, they appeared both on the big stages that accommodated the most spectacular revues and in the makeshift performance venues of small halls and bars. We will explore various major forms of performance and their reception by contemporary intellectuals, as for instance the gender-bending, satirical or shockingly transgressive cabaret performances of Valeska Gert and Anita Berber, the serious, mythologically charged Ausdruckstanz (German Dance) of Mary Wigman and Harald Kreuzberg, or the kick lines of the Americanized girl troupes. Specific attention will be given to the ways in which the performing bodies acquired meaning, both on stage and through discursive contextualization, and how they became representative of prominent concerns and movements of Weimar Germany, including the experience of death and survival in WW I, the turn towards the 'natural' and the 'primitive', political critique, sexual liberation, and the celebration of American mass culture.

    Introductory Reading
  • Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, 'Race' and Nation in Early Modern Dance (London: Routledge, 1998)
  • Susan Manning, Lucia Ruprecht (eds), New German Dance Studies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012)
  • Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

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2. German Sport in the Interwar Years

Modern sport was a British invention of the nineteenth century that spread throughout the world via imperial and commercial networks. In Europe, it competed with indigenous forms of physical exercise such as gymnastics before sweeping all before it, particularly in the interwar years when it boomed as part of massed culture in the era of increased leisure. In Germany, local political conditions made for especially tense competition between rival forms of physical expression. This module will concentrate primarily on sport and 'Turnen' in the Weimar Republic (although it will look backwards and beyond). It will examine the relationship between different key aspects of sport in the period: its aesthetics as a performative activity, the mania for record keeping, the influence of technology (Taylorism), the masses and high culture, and National Socialist ambivalence towards and eventual exploitation of sport. It will focus mainly on football, athletics, cycling and boxing, and include reference to sports films (e.g. Die Elf Teufel; Olympia 1936), sport in film (e.g. Metropolis, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, Kuhle Wampe), 'Körperkultur' (Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit) and prominent literary / feuilletonistic commentary (Brecht: Der Kinnhaken, Der Lebenslauf des Boxers Samson Körner; Kaiser (Von Morgens bis Mitternachts) et al. on the Sechstagerennen).

    Introductory Reading
  • Frank Becker, Amerikanismus in Weimar: Sportsymbole und politische Kultur, 1918-1933 (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1993)
  • Christiane Eisenberg, "English sports" und deutsche Bürger: eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1800-1939 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999)
  • Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) (relevant sections)
  • Hannah Schaub, Riefenstahls Olympia (Munich: Fink, 2003)

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3. Performing Weimar Body Culture

The cultural political upheavals of the Weimar period are in particular evidence in the styles and behaviours of bodies in performance. The performing body takes a variety of forms in this period: exposed in ways that are both liberating and traumatic, but also subject to encasement in uniforms, technology and regulated forms of conduct. Body culture operates on all levels of public behaviour: on the street, in the factory, or in landscape as much as on the stage or screen. This module will begin by giving an overview of the career of the performing body in the Weimar years, taking stock of the paradigm shift from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit. A closer view of the topic will then be taken by reference to filmic representations of the body in performance. From the early Weimar films of Robert Wiene (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919) and Orlacs Hände (1924)), via Lang's mid-period Metropolis (1927), to the sachlich styles of Pabst's Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), Lang's M. (1931) and Dudov and Brecht's Kuhle Wampe (1932), the cinema provides a particular resource for seeing the body both in social and in cultural or aesthetic performance. The early film theory of Belá Balázs, focusing on the idea of cinematic physiognomy as a new arena for cultural performance, provides a framework for the discussion.

    Introductory Reading
  • Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary (London/New York: Routledge, 2000)
  • Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
  • Belá Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001)
  • Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehre der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994)

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4. The Berliner Ensemble: Brecht and Beyond

The Berliner Ensemble is the most famous and longest lasting acting ensemble in German theatre history. Established by Brecht and Helene Weigel in 1949 it acquired an international reputation and remains to this day one of Germany's leading theatre companies. Brecht established a distinctive style of directing and acting founded on communist principles and reconsidered some of the basic issues pertaining to theatre's social role and the relationship between actor and audience. The lectures cover the history of the Berliner Ensemble against the background of political events in Germany from its formation up to the Wende in 1989. The focus is on Brecht's theory and its relation to the practice of production and the way in which subsequently Brechtian methods undergo developments in these forty years. We look closely at political theatre in performance and consider the tension between the desire to preserve the Brechtian legacy on the one hand and the need to experiment and innovate on the other. This is illustrated through more detailed discussion of certain key productions: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1949), Die Mutter (1949, 1951, 1957, 1967, 1974), and Coriolan (1964). Further discussion of the productions of Die Mutter and Coriolan then form the basis of a seminar.

    Brecht texts for close reading
    • Kleines Organon für das Theater; Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder; Die Mutter; Coriolan

      (Recordings on CD of the some of the plays are available from the MML library.)
    Introductory Reading
    • Ruth Berlau, Bertolt Brecht, et al., Theaterarbeit: Sechs Aufführungen des Berliner Ensembles (Dresden: VVV Dresdener Verlag, 1952)
    • Laura Bradley, Brecht and Political Theatre: The Mother on Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006)
    • Carl Weber, 'Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble', in G. Sacks and P. Thomson (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge: CUP, 2004 (1994))
    • John Rouse, Brecht and the West German theatre: the practice and politics of interpretation. (1989)
    • Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht. Routledge Performance Practitioners. (2009)

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5. New German Cinema: Gender and Genre

New German Cinema, in the 1970s in particular, combined formal innovation and social criticism. Its films, by renowned directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta and Wim Wenders, gained international acclaim and put German cinema back on the map. Fassbinder's filmwork, such as Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972), Fontane Effi Briest (1974) or Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979) is left-wing and gender-critical; his attack on patriarchy is also a political attack on the Federal Republic, which he regards as uncritically perpetuating the bourgeois ideology of the nineteenth century. Neuer Deutscher Film also enabled female directors to find a space to work. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta's Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1975) was one of the first commercial successes of the Neuer Deutscher Film movement. Von Trotta's subsequent films on women, politics, and violence (Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and her biopic Rosa Luxemburg (1986)), and Helke Sander's Die allseits reduzierte Persönlichkeit - REDUPERS (1977) are defining feminist films of the period. In 1974, Sander founded the first feminist journal anywhere in the world on film, Frauen und Film; women filmmakers founded an Organisation of Women Working in Film to give them collective bargaining power. The result was that West Germany had more women working in film than any other national cinema. This module will consider the relationship between gender politics and genre conventions and inventions in key film performances of the period.

    Introductory Reading
  • Sandra Frieden et al, Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, 2 vols (Oxford: Berg, 1993), particularly vol. 1, chs 2, 12 and 13 and vol. 2, ch. 11
  • Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (London: Verso, 1992)
  • Judith Mayne, 'Female Narration, Women's Cinema: Helke Sander's The All-Around Reduced Personality: REDUPERS', New German Critique, 24-5 (Fall/Winter, 1981-2)

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6. Society on Stage: Pina Bausch's Tanztheater

The productions of Pina Bausch's Wuppertaler Tanztheater have become one of Germany's most important cultural exports over the last thirty years. A hybrid between theatre and dance, Bausch's work is based on an interest in what moves people, rather than how they move. This interest leads to extensive collaborative rehearsal processes that engage with memory and emotion as both psychic and physical phenomena, and transform them into a highly compelling bodily language. What emerges on stage is a mirror of the anxieties, desires, rejections and everyday moments of contemporary society; of gender relations, power hierarchies, and cultural traditions; of the most intimate dimensions and the most public. This module will closely engage with such pieces as Blaubart - Beim Anhören einer Tonbandaufnahme von Béla Bartóks Oper 'Herzogs Blaubarts Burg' (1977), Bandoneon (1980), Palermo, Palermo (1989), and Masurca Fogo (1998). It will introduce students to the development of Bausch's work as practice and performance, address its Brechtian aspects and its background in the school of choreographer Kurt Jooss, and open up perspectives on other practitioners of Tanztheater, including Susanne Linke, Reinhild Hoffmann, and Johann Kresnik.

    Introductory Reading
  • Raimund Hoghe, Pina Bausch: Tanztheatergeschichten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986)
  • Ana Sanchez-Colberg, '"You put your left foot in, then you shake it all about...": Excursions and Incursions into Feminism and Bausch's Tanztheater', in Dance, Gender and Culture, ed. by Helen Thomas (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 151-163.
  • Jochen Schmidt, Tanztheater in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1992)
  • Norbert Servos, Pina Bausch: Tanztheater (Munich: Kieser, 2003)

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7. Edgar Reitz's Heimat: Television and German Social Memory

This module looks at German social memory and cultural self-consciousness in the 1980s with particular reference to the first series of Edgar Reitz's monumental work for television and cinema, Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik (1984). The work is approached through a range of perspectives: in relation to ideological constructions and performances of 'Heimat' in the German tradition since the nineteenth century; in terms of its own complex, self-reflexive structures; in the context of its different medial significations as film, TV and media event; and as the object of public and critical reception in print and other forms. Particular attention is given to the place of Heimat in the performance culture of German television in the 1980s and its contribution to the formation of personal and collective identity between international, national, and more local levels. There will also be consideration of how the docu-fantasy of twentieth-century German life created by Heimat 1 is continued in its sequels over the next two decades.

    Introductory Reading
  • Elizabeth Boa, Rachel Palfreyman (ed.), Heimat - A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890-1990 (Oxford: OUP, 2000)
  • New German Critique, 36 (Fall 1985), on Heimat
  • Eric. L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990)

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8. From Modernism to Postmodernism: the Influence of Brecht and the ‘Post-dramatic’ in Contemporary German Theatre

This module explores the legacy of Brecht and his collaborators for the contemporary German theatre. Since the Wende, Germany - and Berlin especially - has proved extraordinarily fertile for the development of a wide range of radical directorial approaches in the theatre. Looking at a selection of works by significant contemporary directors, including Frank Castorf (Volksbühne), Luk Perceval (Thalia Theater), Thomas Ostermeier (Schaubühne) and Armin Petras (Maxim Gorki Theater), the module will explore how the modernist Brechtian legacy has encouraged an investigation of the very processes of theatricality that theorist Hans-Thies Lehmann has described as 'postdramatic'. If drama implies a reference to a knowable world, a totality, this implication of an experiential totality is disrupted by the postdramatic. An in-depth examination of Brecht’s epic theatre, setting it within its historical and cultural context, will provide the basis for drawing out the relationship between theory and practice in the contemporary German theatre.

Students are encouraged to see theatre productions in Berlin or elsewhere in Germany (Hamburg; Munich) if they possibly can. For recommendations please email zas21.

    Introductory Reading
  • Bertolt Brecht, Kleines Organon für das Theater
  • Bertolt Brecht, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder
  • Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006, [first published in German in 1999]); especially 'Panorama of postdramatic theatre'
  • Ruth Berlau, Bertolt Brecht, et al., Theaterarbeit: Sechs Aufführungen des Berliner Ensembles (Dresden: VVV Dresdener Verlag, 1952)
  • Carl Weber, 'Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble', in G. Sacks and P. Thomson (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge: CUP, 2004 (1994))
  • Birgit Haas, Modern German Political Drama 1980-2000 (Rochester: Camden House, 2003)

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9. Surveillance in German film: observation and training

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the Stasi’s surveillance archive, the Stasi has become a defining cultural image, not only of the former GDR but of surveillance in modern Germany as a whole. This module explores the portrayal of surveillance in recent German cinema: surveillance by the Stasi, but also by the agencies of the unified Federal Republic. We will consider the different kinds of performance portrayed in a number of films, performances which as we shall discover are  bound up with processes of teaching and learning how to observe others, and how to behave as a result. In the opening scene of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 blockbuster Das Leben der Anderen, the Stasi spy Gerhard Wiesler is shown teaching a new intake of Stasi officers-in-training the art of interrogation. Over the course of the film we then observe Wiesler learning from his own surveillance operations how to behave more ethically and independently. We will read the film in concert with material from the Stasi archive, including videotapes that were used to teach Stasi spies the techniques necessary for effective surveillance. We will go on to consider the representation of surveillance in the West, in Michael Klier’s Der Riese of 1984, which includes footage from military training tapes, and in Harun Farocki's recent docu-films about the high-security marketplaces and prisons of late capitalism. We will compare and contrast the regimes of surveillance portrayed in these  films and tapes, and discuss the behaviours of control, of conformity and of resistance that can be learnt here – both by the characters within the films, and by the audiences for whom they were produced.

    Introductory Reading
  • Thomas Elsaesser, Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
  • Owen Evans, 'Redeeming the demon? The legacy of the Stasi in Das Leben der Anderen', Memory Studies 3/2 (2010), 164-177
  • Michel Foucault, '11 January 1978', in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, ed. by Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
  • Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne & Peter Weibel (eds), Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002)
  • John E. McGrath, Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space (New York: Routledge, 2004)

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10. Bodies in Performance: Dance and Gymnastics from Weimar to National Socialism

During the first half of the twentieth century the moving body was tested over and over again as an agent of social and cultural change. Images of these bodies have imprinted themselves on our consciousness: the optimistic wanderers exploring the outdoors hiking through beautiful landscapes or climbing pristine mountain tops in the 1910s; the mutilated, shell-shocked soldiers who had survived World War I and then littered the city streets as beggars and invalids; the daring girls with short and sharp haircuts in short and sharp outfits dancing the Charleston in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s but also the uniformed young people on barricades, street fighters in Berlin, Munich or Hamburg; the German crowds screaming "Heil Hitler" in the 1930s with their arms out-stretched; the contorted bodies of the victims of Nazism pushed into graves by bull-dozers in concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

How do these images correlate to one another? Do we think of them within a cultural continuum or do they represent the radical ruptures that tore apart the twentieth century?

In this module we will examine the way in which the moving body turned into the project of a harmonious and homogenous society. Gymnastics and dance became two powerful tools that helped to construct a coherent national identity, health, beauty, strength and a utopian future. Gymnastics and dance also were the disciplines through which a political transformation from democratic Weimar to the Nazi Third Reich was most successfully achieved.

    Introductory Reading
  • Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005)
  • Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
  • Bode, Rudolph. "Die geistigen Grundlager für Körperbildung und Tanz im Nationalsozialismus." Der Tanz. (Berlin, November 1933)
  • Hannah Schaub, Riefenstahls Olympia (Munich: Fink, 2003)

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Further reading

  • Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999)
  • Christopher Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft (Berlin: Schmidt, 2003)
  • Rob Burns (ed.), German Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 1995)
  • Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990)
  • Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London: Routledge, 1993)
  • Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004)
  • John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford: OUP, 1999)
  • Tracy Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Cambridge: CUP, 2008)
  • Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1996)
  • Carolin Duttlinger, Lucia Ruprecht, Andrew Webber (ed.), Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies (Berne: Lang, 2003)
  • Erika Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2002)
  • Erika Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (Tübingen: UTB, 1999)
  • Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective (University of Iowa Press, 1997)
  • Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London/New York: Routledge, 2002)
  • Eva Kolinsky, Wilfried van der Will (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 1998)
  • Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2006)
  • Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A. Parker (ed.), Performance and Performativity (London: Routledge, 1995)
  • Andreas Kotte, Theaterwissenschaft: eine Einführung (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005)
  • Helen Thomas, The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
  • Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
  • A History of German Theatre. Edited by Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 445 pp
  • Performative Body Spaces: Corporeal Topographies in Literature, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts, ed. Markus Hallensleben (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010)

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Course adviser

Students who wish to discuss any aspect of the course may approach their Directors of Studies or supervisors. They may also consult the Department's undergraduate course adviser for this paper, who is Prof Andrew Webber of Churchill College (network tel: 36211, e-mail: ajw12@cam.ac.uk).

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Links to all German papers and comparative papers with a substantial German element

 

 

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