Notes on the German Theatre Crisis

David Ashley Hughes

The early 1990s were a time of massive upheaval in the German theatre world. The collapse of communism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), followed by the arduous process of German reunification, necessitated the most radical shake up of domestic theatre structures since 1933, when the Nazis brought the diverse theatre institutions of the Weimar Republic under the central authority of the Reich Theatre Chamber (see Steinweis 1990). What occurred after 1990, of course, was by no means as foreboding as this, but it did mark a period of tremendous confusion as German theatre companies had to be restructured, repertoires overhauled, and the function of national theatre urgently rethought. This was a unique point in German theatre history at which macro-economic, political, and social crises simultaneously converged. The demands of a postmodern economy, for instance, ruthlessly took their toll on a theatre system that was, in many respects, still fit for 19th-century purposes. The end of the cold war, meanwhile, called into question the political and ideological role of the theatre, which had been self-evident for the greater part of the 20th century. Generational conflict also broke out as the theatre paradigms established in 1968 were fiercely attacked by a new cohort of German dramaturges. In the resultant chaos and instability, tempers flared, reputations were made and lost, and viewpoints were frequently overdetermined by arguments that no longer made sense within a fundamentally altered theatrical context. With the benefit of hindsight, it therefore seems salutary to reflect on the so-called German theatre crisis and to put its various fissures and fragmentations into perspective. From the summer of 1991, as the full cost of German reunification became all too selfevident, state subsidies to German theatres were cut back significantly, setting in motion a process of structural transformation in the theatre world that became synonymous with theatre closures, the reduction of personnel, and financial consolidation at all levels. Ticket prices in both the East and the West skyrocketed (more or less tripling at the Deutsches Theater and Komische Oper in East Berlin), while the number of theatregoers plummeted (in the East, from around 10 or 11 million tickets sold per annum during the previous 20 years to just 5 or 6 million in the 1989/90 season). The emphasis suddenly fell on the box office and the American profit-maximizing model of culture; most theatres began planning their repertoires around entertainment, scheduling comedies and popular classics in order to fill seats. Well-known Broadway musicals, which previously had not been staged owing to the costs for performance rights, now became the hits alongside the old operatic warhorses such as Mozart, Puccini, and Wagner, just as drama became dominated by Shakespeare and Lessing, Goethe and Schiller,

David Hughes received his PhD in German Studies from Duke University in 2006. He has published widely on contemporary German theatre, art history, film, and politics, as well as on theories of globalization. Disillusioned with the academy, he now lives and works in England, where he is writing his first novel.
TDR: The Drama Review 51:4 (T196) Winter 2007. 2007 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Kleist and Bchner, not to mention classic modernists such as Brecht/Weill and Drrenmatt. On Berlins theatre-lined Friedrichstrasse, Not dialectical materialism, but materialism, pure and simple, was the driving force both in and out of the theatre (Dasgupta 1991:65). No playhouse was immune to the crisis. Carl Weber and Chris Salter have each written worthwhile commentaries on the enforced reconfigurations of such major stages as the Berliner Ensemble, the Deutsches Theater, the Volksbhne, the Maxim Gorki Theater, the Schiller Theater, and the Schaubhne (Weber 1991; Salter 1996). But former GDR theatres were hardest hit by the new turbo capitalism, the remorseless return of free-market values. The GDR had the densest theatre network in the worldNo other country supported on a per capita basis an equivalent number of small public theatres with relatively small budgets as the GDR did (Schlling 1993:26). Often these small theatres were located in towns with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants, and over 30 percent of the entire theatregoing audience in the GDR attended these theatres. The East German theatre also produced exceptional actors, directors, and designers in numbers that were staggering given the small size of the population (16 million versus West Germanys 62 million). The reason for this lay in the tension between a state that was eager to invest in theatre for ideological reasons (using socialist realism to promote its communist goals) and playwrights who, paradoxically, increasingly used the stage as a place to criticize the regime. Especially with the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Mller, The institution of theatre in the GDR provided from its earliest years a crucial venue for social critique or for alternative forms of public sphere in a society in which legitimate publicity was dominated by the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the Socialist Unity Party] (Kruger 1994:492). The cuts of the early 90s, however, had a disastrous effect on the former GDRs highly articulated theatrical landscape. Small theatres in droves were forced to close or merge, many fixed ensembles had to disband, and as theatre lost its compensatory function with the end of actually existing socialism,1 so the people lost interest in it. A talent drain ensued, with many of the better actors, directors, and designers moving west for higher salaries and an improved standard of living. The crisis cut even deeper. The problem was not just outdated GDR theatre structures and the cost of absorbing a failed communist economy into a capitalist one. It had to do more broadly with a theatre system that was established in Germany in the 19th century and whose basic structures had remained largely unaltered since. As early as 1980, Arno Paul noted that: With some polemical exaggeration, the present theatre system in the Federal Republic could be called a prolongation of court theatre. Public accessibility, the pluralistic repertory, the unconditional and generous subsidization from tax funds, and the highly bureaucratic production situation were all practices introduced during the era of the Kaiser. Regardless of whether the focus is on the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, or the Federal Republic, they all expanded the antiquated structure. (1980:24) As a result, Paul observed, the German theatre system had consolidated in such a manner that, to a large extent, it remained removed from the dynamics of a highly industrialized society, and he expressed doubt as to whether this condition can or should be maintained. (24) The peculiar character of German theatre structures owes in large measure to the privileged role of culture in German history. As Alan Steinweiss comments in his article on the Nazi Theatre Chamber,2 The very term Kultur has connoted a merging of national identity with an appreciation of artistic achievement, and artists, generally speaking, have traditionally been highly respected members of German society (1990:442). In fact, German identity has been
David Ashley Hughes 1. The postwar communist description of economic and social organization in the Eastern Bloc, meant in contrast with the allegedly phony forms of Western socialism, social democracy in particular. 2.. The Nazi Theatre Chamber was a subdivision of the Reich Chamber of Culture, a compulsory organization that regulated the economic and social affairs of the culture professions in the Third Reich.

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predicated on culture ever since the Sturm und Drang playwrights of the 1770s sought to change German dependence on French theatrical models, which pandered to the court of Louis XIV: From Lessing and the Sturm und Drang playwrights to Goethe and Schiller, from Bchner to Hauptmann, to Brecht and Mller, the German theatre has always attracted or generated writers who regard the stage as a place of national discourse and a tool of historical change. (Weber 1991:57) Because the theatre has always been integral to national identity in Germany, it has, historically, received abnormally high state subsidies that make no sense whatsoever based on free-market logic. Especially in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), where questions of German national identity were driven underground after the Hitler years, the theatre became a crucial mechaBecause the theatre has always been nism for promoting social cohesion and community. West Germanys ostentatious cultural palaces, with integral to national identity in Germany, their enormous technical and administrative it has, historically, received abnormally systems and large staff, received the lions share of high state subsidies that make no sense cultural subsidies, which could not be cut back for social reasons. Consequently, theatre subsidies per whatsoever based on free-market logic. capita in the Federal Republic were higher than in any other country on earth. Seen historically, it was simply a matter of time until Germanys theatre system ran up against urgent reform, and the events of 1989/90 really only catalyzed the inevitable. But what most commentators caught up in the panic and confusion of the early 90s failed to recognize was the significant degree of continuity found in German theatre structures before and after the Wende (the colloquial German term for reunification). Only Traute Schlling saw that, despite debates on structure in both the FRG and the GDR, the dense network of communal theatres (Stadttheater) established by the bourgeoisie in the 19th century was protected, with its claim to cultural education and prestige and its function as an instrument of social distinction and hegemony (1993:22). As an East German watching her beloved GDR theatre structures rapidly disintegrating, Schlling overplayed the negative aspects of the Stadttheater, citing Mllers dictum that it deserves to be buried in shit for its proscenium stages and swollen administrations that impede vital dialogue between actors and audience (in Weick 1990:9). The more important point, however, is that the German Unification Treaty of 1990 provided for the continuation of state subsidies for a vastly outdated, economically wasteful theatre system rather than trying to overhaul that system in its entirety. So it is worth bearing in mind that although subsidies have been significantly cut back and the East German theatre landscape radically transformed, German theatre remains one of the most subsidized and productive in the world, with the Berlin culture budget alone reaching over $800 million in 1996.

The Depoliticization of German Theatre

From the standpoint of former GDR theatre critics in particular, the German theatre crisis was not only an economic disaster, it also sucked the political lifeblood from domestic theatre. Ever since Lessing, theatre in Germany had been seen as socially didactica site of training in moral and political enlightenment for the masses. According to Lessing, the function of drama was to enlighten and improve the masses and not to confirm them in their prejudices or in their ignoble mode of thought ([176769] 1962:8). In 1769, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing defended theatre as a moral institution, and The Stage as a Moral Institution was also the title of a famous lecture given by the 25-year-old Friedrich Schiller in Weimar in 1784. Schiller was one of the young Sturm und Drang playwrights who used drama as a vehicle for social comment and critical moral judgment and who often emphasized the repressive aspects of their times, fearlessly tackling social taboos. In the early 19th century, Georg Bchner, influenced

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by the communist theories of Gracchus Babeuf and Henri de Saint-Simon, sought to use theatre as a means of politically educating the peasantry. His fragment play Woyzeck (1836), for instance, is the first literary work in German whose main characters are members of the working class. During the industrial revolution, the naturalist plays of Gerhart Hauptmann shocked their audiences by portraying squalor and depression among working people. Hauptmanns play Die Weber (The Weavers; 1892) was based on the Silesian workers revolt of 1844, and was exemplary in its usage of realist character types and dialect as the first indication of social class. In the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht became the minence grise of political theatre. By using various distanciation devices, he sought to lay bare a social reality that could and should be changed. Arguably Brechts greatest successor, Mller followed Andrei Zhdanovs prescription of ideologically educating the masses in the spirit of socialism ([1934] 1981:23) but sought to rearticulate many of the formal characteristics of socialist realism such as narrative coherence, ideological totality, and closure. Mllers plays were widely seen as giving voice to the real political desires of GDR citizens, while in the West, playwrights such as Franz Xaver Kroetz, Martin Sperr, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder looked to recuperate the tradition of the German Volksstck (from Ferdinand Raimund through Brecht, dn von Horvath, and Marieluise Fleisser) as a theatrical mode aimed at bringing the lower classes to a sense of class consciousness. In the early 1990s, this proud tradition of political theatre in Germany seemed to be swept aside by the triumphant march of consumer capitalism and the appearance of a new, moneyed audience with different tastes and desires. Leading East German theatres in particular found themselves unexpectedly having to cater to middle-class, West German theatregoers who constituted as much as 70 to 80 percent of the audience at venues like the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. An emergent middle class in the East likewise looked to the theatre as a symbol of social prestige rather than social change, and in light of financial difficulties theatre managers were forced to adapt their repertories in order to solicit the support of this growing stratum. The result, as one West German commentator lamented in 1991, was that repertory in the Eastern states had come even to surpass the uniformity and the accommodation of those in the West, even though the lapsing of coerced attention to contemporary socialist drama does not automatically inspire new creativity but rather liberates the gray diversity of normalcy (Ruf 1991:5). One of the hallmarks of this new, cafeteria-style theatre in Germany was its overwhelming lack of concern with the former GDR and the social problems besetting the new Eastern states. In 1991/92, only 20 productions of plays by East German authors were staged nationwide, and renowned director Thomas Langhoff expressed the fear that now the public wants only to forget everything from the past, repress it, become citizens of the Federal Republic as quickly as possible and not stand out any longer (in Schlling 1993:30). Mller, who was elected President of the East German Academy of Arts in 1990, sought to resist the drive to overwrite GDR culture by blocking attempts by several of the German state governments to dissolve the Academy. He looked for ways to permit the Academy either to reform itself or to merge with its West Berlin counterpart on its own terms, in order that critical memory work could be undertakenand not just by West Germans on behalf of their reluctant neighbors (see Rouse 1993:66). At the 29th Theatertreffen in Berlin in 1992, furthermore, the jury did not select any productions that directly tackled social reality. The new states especially suffered from this exclusion. With the exception of one East Berlin production, not a single offering from the former East [Germany] found favor in the eyes of a jury whose two East German members carried barely enough weight to motivate their colleagues to travel to the oh-so-distant German Democratic Republic. (Krug 1993:91) Remember, however, that the Theatertreffen was founded in 1963 as a means of reinforcing Western culture in the oasis of West Berlin two years after the erection of the Berlin Wall. East German playwrights only participated in it from 1989.

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Unsurprisingly, East German theatre critics were the most vociferous protesters of the upheavals. Schlling, for example, expressed bitterness about the increasing privatization of German culture, and, in place of theatre as art, called for a renewal of theatre as a social concept, much as it had been in the GDR. She thus cited several East German theatres as places in which to find not only stage productions, but also films, exhibits, sociocultural events, theatre-in-education projects, restaurants, dances, parties, and discussion groups. Theatre director Adolf Dresen, similarly, borrowing Brechts notion of Kunschta punning neologism combining kitsch with the word for art, Kunstthought that German theatre need neither be cheap entertainment nor pretentious aestheticism: Vis--vis kitsch or Kunscht, non-engaged trivia or the puzzles of the most up-to-date aesthetic, there is only one path to takethat of repoliticization, when properly understood. Political theatre need neither be oppositional nor agitational. Quite what such a third way was supposed to look like was unclear, but Dresen thought it must be possible given theatres fundamental status as a social entity (gesellschaftliche Instanz) (1997:18).3 The pattern was repeated when Michael Schindhelm voiced his annoyance at theatres increasing reliance on box office receipts, objecting that [t]heatre is social movement in public space. Theatre for Schindhelm was thus inherently political, even if it had lost its ideological moorings after the end of the cold war: During the years of division, the theatre had an ideological mandate, in the East and in the West. This mandate was retracted after 1989 and not replaced (in Wengierek 1999:K7). Despite such calls to repoliticize German theatre in the 1990s, it is worth recalling that postwar theatre in Germany never was as political as it would have us believe. In the GDR, a country founded on access to education and culture for the working class, the proportion of manual laborers among the theatre audience never actually rose above 10 percentdespite propaganda slogans such as live socialistically, live with culture and corresponding organizational measures like subscription services and theatre festivals sponsored by labor unions. Nor was there a middle class in the GDR for whom theatre attendance represented an obligatory educational experience or a way of acquiring social prestige. Rather, regular theatergoers were children and young people, students, intellectuals, teachers, doctors, white collar workers, the retiredi.e., people who did not merely go to the theatre but for whom art in general was an important component in the quality of life (Schlling 1993:28). If anything, GDR theatre leaned toward elitism insofar as those working in it enjoyed certain advantages over their fellow citizens, including travels to the West, financial bonuses, and complete job security (East German theatre workers could not be fired until they reached retirement age). In the Federal Republic, meanwhile, theatre audiences were always largely middle classofficials, academics, professionals, and small business people, a sizeable majority of whom had higher education and they only ever comprised around five percent of the total population (Ismayr 1997:427; Paul 1980:23). There was hardly a country in the world, furthermore, where directors, designers, and actors in subsidized theatre received comparable remuneration to that of their West German counterparts. Thus in neither Germany was theatre ever truly mass art; on the contrary, it was in many ways exclusive. Arguably the most political theatre in Germany during the cold war was the so-called Offscene (Off-Szene) comprised of experimental free groups (freie Gruppen). These came into being in many large cities in the Federal Republic in the wake of the student movement in the late 1960s. Targeting worker audiences, they sought to create critical, entertaining theatre specific to the audiences own concrete problems. This very direct type of theatre could not be achieved under the hierarchical, highly bureaucratic mechanisms of state and communal theatre; indeed, the free groups found themselves largely excluded from the generous theatre subsidy system in West Germany. Approximately 96 percent of total subsidies was given to support the publicly funded sector of German theatre, whose audience included around two-thirds of the

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3. All translations from German are my own.

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theatregoing public; only 4 percent went to independent theatre, and even this had to be divided among resident and touring private companies in addition to the free groups. Usually these alternative groups received a paltry lump sum to cover production costs. They tended to launch just one extended tour per season and faced closure if their members did not earn incomes elsewhere. Nor were these groups helped at the local level, since many West German towns tended to make do with commercial touring companies or guest performances from subsidized theatres in nearby cities rather than supporting an independent theatre company. There was also political pressure on these groupsthe Frankfurt group Theater am Turm (TAT), for instance, was abolished by the conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) after the local elections in 1978, before reforming without a fixed ensemble in 1980. In the GDR, free groups first appeared in the mid-1980s and developed only very slowly in large urban centers like Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden. Without public financial support and constantly under suspicion as a subversive activity directed against the state, they could hardly survive due to too few production possibilities, minimal income, frequent obstructions, if not outright prohibition by state authorities (Schlling 1993:24). After reunification, when the Eastern states adapted to the West German Landesbhnen model,4 the Off scene briefly grew there, perhaps in compensation for the closure of many public theatres. Especially in the larger cities, councils tried to support alternative theatre, either with monies provided by the Federal government for job creation, or with local funds for cultural projects and support programs. Yet by the late 90s, the free theatre scene nationwideand in Berlin in particularwas characterized by increasing competition for funding among small companies. In 1999, free and private theatre, which used to draw grants from separate sources, The Off aesthetic was now little more were put into the same funding pot. The Off than nostalgia; large state theatres like aesthetic was now little more than nostalgia; large state theatres like the Volksbhne had long since the Volksbhne had long since adapted adapted the look of experimentation far more the look of experimentation far more professionally than the free scene could manage. Alternative theatre thus ultimately went the way of professionally than the free scene could professionalization, with fixed ensembles, copromanage. ductions with state and communal theatres, and scheduled participation in theatre festivals.

The Legacy of Brecht

One interesting way of reading the depoliticization of German theatre is to look at the changing reception of Brecht in East and West Germany since 1945. After all: Much of the political drama since Brechts death has been written and performed with his formidable theoretical example in view, and even those dramatists who have refused Brechts political aesthetic have done so in the wake of its radical reconfigurations of theatre art. (Garner 1990:14546) Max Frisch, Friedrich Drrenmatt, Peter Weiss, Martin Walser, Fassbinder, Kroetz, and Mller all recognized themselves as Brechts heirs. Yet in the 1950s, the response to Brecht was decidedly less enthusiastic. In the GDR, for example, influential critics who were partial to the SED regime followed in the vein of the early Georg Lukcs by criticizing Brecht for not properly adhering to the ideological postulates of socialist realism. Despite setting new standards of production, creating new methods of directing and dramaturgy, and redefining the directors role at the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht was left to reflect in his journal on 4 March

David Ashley Hughes

4. The West German Landesbhnen model refers to theatre organized on the federal model, usually involving theatre companies touring within a particular federal state.

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1953: Our performances in Berlin achieve hardly any response anymore. In the press, reviews appear months after opening night and they contain nothing except a few meager sociological analyses (in Weber 1980:115). Matters did improve somewhat, however, after the Ensemble was twice invited to the Thtre des Nations in Paris in 1954 and 1955, where it won the festival prize and the acclaim of the international theatre communitya success that could not have failed to make an impact at home. In the Federal Republic, meanwhile, a practically unanimous Brecht boycott took place after the famous playwright had opted to return from exile to the GDR. Even when certain theatres did produce Brecht, they were forced to renew the boycott because of political events: the GDR workers strike in 1953, the Hungarian revolution in 1956, and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. After the latter, Brecht productions in West Germany fell by half over the course of two seasons, and in 1959, Martin Esslins infamous book Brecht: A Choice of Evils appeareda farcical condemnation of Brecht as morally corrupt and even crazy for his alleged loyalty to Stalin. Things changed with the rise of the New Left in West Germany in the early 60s, bringing a golden age for Brechtian theatre. The Berliner Ensemble became the destination of a kind of aesthetic pilgrimage by young directors from the West. Frischs Andorra (1961) and Drrenmatts Die Physiker (The Physicists; 1962) were each modeled on the Brechtian parable play and were overwhelmingly successful in the Federal Republic for their confrontation with the Nazi past. But astute observers worried that German theatregoers did not see themselves implicated in the parabolic representation of their immediate past, and playwrights who wanted to hit home modeled their theatre television documentary materials, which they felt to have more of an impact. Armed with irrefutable evidence from the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, those dramatists set out to force the German populace to face and hopefully come to terms with the Nazi past. Their documentary dramaepitomized by plays such as Rolf Hochhuths Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy; 1963), Heinar Kipphardts In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer; 1964), and Peter Weisss Die Ermittlung (The Investigation; 1965)was premised on the Brechtian belief that the insight into reality it furnished would affect the sociopolitical consciousness at large and so influence the political decisions of the day. And yet, the sheer number of Brecht plays that were produced in the Federal Republic during the 1960s meant that they became increasingly assimilated into mainstream theatre practice, losing their agitational sting. In 1964, Frisch famously asserted that Brecht had attained the penetrating ineffectiveness of a classic ([1964] 1976:342). As Brecht became one of the most performed playwrights in German-speaking countries, the slogan Brecht-Mdigkeit (Brecht fatigue) was heard more and more. Peter Handke summed up the widespread disillusion with Brecht in his provocatively titled essay Horvth Is Better than Brecht, in which he questioned the dominance of Brecht in the repertory of contemporary classics, described his parables as fairy tales, and bitterly remarked, Brecht has destroyed me (1968:28). In the GDR, too, Brecht became something of a modern classic. Under the stewardship of Helene Weigel and with important contributions from Ruth Berghaus, the Berliner Ensemble experienced an inventive, experimental period in the early 60s, culminating in a memorable production of Coriolanus in 1964 (for which Berghaus choreographed the battle scenes). By this point, Brecht had become a textbook author in East German schools; he was, perversely, used as the official icon of socialist realism against younger, more rebellious playwrights. When Berghaus took charge of the Berliner Ensemble in 1971, she tried adapting Brechts work to contemporary circumstances. This increasingly brought her into conflict with Brechts daughter Barbara who administrated his theatrical estate, and she was fired in 1977. In the West, meanwhile, Brechts objective, forward-looking dramaturgy proved incompatible with the concerns of the post-1968 generation of directors. Questions of subjectivity and psychology, as well as the urge to define oneself in terms of German history and classical German culture topped the bill in West German theatre in the 1970s. Where Brecht did surface, it was in post-Brechtian guise, involving:

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the simultaneous appropriation and revision of Brechtian political theatre on the part of feminists and non-Western writers; experiments in decentering the function of dramatic/ theatrical authorship; [and] stagings of Brechts plays that open dialogues with Brechts own theatre practice. (Garner 1990:146) By the end of the decade, nearly all the leading directors in German theatre refrained from staging Brechts plays. The important playwrights distanced themselves from his theory and dramaturgy, and prominent critics tended to deprecate or ignore Brecht productions. In a Theater Heute poll in 1977/78, only one Brecht production was nominated for most relevant achievement in playwriting, and in successive years from 1978 to 1980, Hellmuth Karasek wrote a Spiegel article entitled Brecht Is Dead, Sibylle Wirsing coined the ugly term Court Theatre of Socialism to describe the Berliner Ensemble, and even erstwhile Brecht protg Carl Weber wondered, was Brecht in Eclipse? (Karasek 1978; Wirsing 1979; Weber 1980). The 1980s did nothing to rescue Brechts reputation in the German theatre world. According to Klaus Vlker, writing in 1987: The cooperation between the state and Brechts heirs permits no interpretation of his work contrary to official policy. Thus, while Brecht has been reduced to pure entertainment in the West, his theatre has become a party organ in the East (432). After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, Brechts legacy was tarnished still further. In 1991, the Berliner Ensemble was privatized amidst claims that it had degenerated into a musty museum. Against former GDR employment protection measures, its company was trimmed from around 280 employees to less than 70. Managing director Manfred Wekwerth was replaced by a rotating committee of star directors including Heiner Mller, Peter Palitzsch, Fritz Marquardt, Peter Zadek, and (after Matthias Langhoff declined) longtime Zadek actor Eva Mattes. What followed was one of the causes clbres of recent German theatre history. The press had a field day caricaturing the new blood chosen to run the company as an old mens club, accusing each director of drawing an exorbitant pension from the state in the form of a DM130,000 base salary plus additional fees for every production. Zadek then publically attacked Mllers political agenda before resigning his directorship, and when Mller took charge while terminally ill, Palitzsch also quit. Reflecting on the fate of the Ensemble in 1992, the American journalist John Rockwell snidely dismissed Brechts political art as a quaint anachronism (1992). In 1994 John Fuegis massively controversial book Brecht and Company was releaseda notoriously ill-informed and revisionary biography that amounted to a fulllength character assassination. All indications were that if political theatre in Germany were to have any future after 1990, then Brecht would scarcely play a part in it.

Tyranny in the Theatre

The German theatre crisis of the early 1990s did not end with the demise of 20th-century political theatre as epitomized by Brecht, nor was it just structural and economic. It also involved generational conflict as a new cohort of German playwrights looked to jettison the theatre practices of their elders and to embark on a radically new aesthetic trajectory. This was, in essence, the moment at which the so-called 89ers (the third generation of postwar Germans) overturned the longstanding cultural consensus of their parents, the 68ers. In terms of theatre, this meant rejecting the once radical ideas that had united a new breed of directors in the late 1960s, including Peter Zadek, Hans Hollmann, Peter Stein, Dieter Dorn, Hans Neuenfels, Claus Peymann, and Jrgen Flimm. Initially working outside of traditional state theatres, most of these 68ers took Brechtian theatre practice (as opposed to his dramaturgy) as their point of departure:
David Ashley Hughes

They wanted to change the structural organization of the theatre. The politicization of West German theatre depended less on plays and themes or issues than on the working methods between director and actor, the structural organization of the theatre, and particularly on the notion of codetermination in theatre practice. (Vlker 1987:427)

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As practice assumed priority over dramaturgy in West German theatre, directors and stage designers were granted a privileged status, much as they had been in the days of the Weimar Republic. To take just one outstanding example from that time, the theatre of Erwin Piscator was, in the words of Jeffrey Schnapp, aimed at the phantasm of total participation ensured through a technologically enhanced and intensified experience of the real, orchestrated and controlled by a single director/dictator (1994:97). German theatre has always been hierarchical in one form or another. Its modernist valorization of the technical mastery of the director and his scenic artists really only replaced the 19thcentury image of the actor as a man of superior education and notable physical, intellectual and affective attainments. For the actors skill at representing the inner life of the characters he portrayed, his ability to demonstrate how widely disparate traits of character could be united to form an integrated personality and his mastery of elegant posture and gesture, all gave him an elevated stature, distinguished him as a special man. (Williams 1983:109) All this was codified for the actor, most notably by Goethe in his famous rules, in which it was stated that the actor must maintain his poise even offstage. Such views tended to encourage virtuosity among the acting profession and advanced the actor in the eyes of the public as the central artist or genius of the theatre. Ludwig Tieck writes: The true actor must not only understand his writer, in several places he must be able to surpass him [] In the greatest of poetic works there are several places where the poet must stand back and the mastery of the stage begins, where the genius of the actor has to reign alone. (in Williams 1983:113) There are certain parallels between Tiecks presentation of the actor and Richard Riddells reflection on the role of the director in West German theatre of the 1970s: The German director has become the great interpreter, probing texts, usually the classics, searching for something that matters to contemporary man. The results of his dramaturgical investigations are subjective, fragmentary, and generally bewildering to an audience who hasnt accompanied him on his month- or yearlong journey of self-discovery. His insights are not always theirs. Rich imagery fills the stages, and it is personal, often violent, and tinged with expressionism. (1980:39) Like Tiecks actor, Riddells director was a much more important figure than the playwright himself when it came to interpreting history, because both actors and directors were directly commissioned by the state. Just as the Romantic actor was normally engaged in the services of a royal patron, so the generous theatre subsidy system in the Federal Republic meant that West German theatre directors were effectively assigned the mandate to produce national art (Kultur) that would create a sense of national identity and foster social cohesion in a country otherwise beset by political division and instability. Thus, like the German Romantics, the 1968 generation of West German theatre directors tended to create vehemently subjective works that scoured the past for clues that might help in the construction of present-day identity. There was, of course, an obvious tension between this artisanal mode of production and a stage design that had kept abreast of the most recent advances in modern technology. In the theatre of the Weimar Republic, design and technology had generally been used to complement and comment on the dramatic action in a way that enhanced the project of the director Brechts economical Bhnenbau (stage design) being a case in point. By 1980, in contrast, Riddell was able to observe: No longer is the designer satisfied with supporting a directors interpretation or with facilitating the action. He wants to speak directly to the audience, telling them in visual terms of his personal reaction to the text and to the world he lives in. (1980:40)

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Brechts Bhnenbau was thus replaced by the Bhnenraum, a hybrid of theatre and contemporary art developed by three designers in particular: Wilifried Minks (with the Bremer Theater from 1962 to 1973), Karl-Ernst Herrmann (with the Schaubhne am Halleschen Ufer from 1970), and Achim Freyer (with Peymanns ensemble in Stuttgart from 1972 to 1979). These men produced audacious, domineering mise-en-scnes capable of masking the work of an uninspired director, but also of determining directorial strategy itself. Thus, this uniquely West German trend resulted in a tyranny of the designer equal to that of the director, as well as in experimental theatre on a grand scaleit was almost as if the experimentation of Off-Broadway were being presented on Broadway (Kirby 1980:3). In the 1980s, many of the leading directors of the 1968 generation assumed high-ranking positions among the most renowned institutions of the German-speaking theatre world, for instance Dieter Dorn at the Kammerspiele in Munich in 1983, Jrgen Flimm at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 1985, and Peymann at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1986. And yet, in line with the collapse of the left-liberal consensus in the Federal Republic and the election of a conservative government in 1982, West German theatre experienced the 1980s as a time of crisis and stagnation. Admittedly, design reached new heights of iconography and technology, but the success of many a production owed predominantly if not exclusively to its sets and costumes. Very few strong directing talents emerged after the boom of the 1970s, and this led increasingly to the invitation of directors and actors from the GDR, including Alfred Dresen, Manfred Karge, the brothers Langhoff (Thomas and Matthias), B.K. Tragelehn, and Alexander Lang. Similarly, East German playwrights such as Heiner Mller, Volker Braun, Christoph Hein, Ulrich Plenzdorf, and Georg Seidel were given permission to have their plays staged in the Federal Republic, and the number of visits by companies from one country to the other steadily increased. By the end of the decade, West German theatre, once the envy of the world, had relatively little to show for its massive per capita investment.

Theatre of the New Type

After German reunification, and with the 1968 model of theatre gutted, established dramatists rapidly lost ground: Handke and Strau carried on the aestheticism of the good old days; the theatre heard nothing more from Braun or Hein (Wengierek 1999). Symptomatic of the German theatre crisis, it was common knowledge that new talent was scarce. In fact, when the jury at the Berlin Theatertreffen in 1994 tried inviting mostly younger directors to the festival, it was savaged in the press because of the lack of quality productions that year. In 1995, consequently, trusted favorites like Frank Castorf and Jrgen Flimm formed the backbone of the festival, while the main organs of the German theatre pressTheater Heute and its former Eastern counterpart Theater der zeitcontinued to display skepticism toward younger theatre artists. By the mid-90s, however, it was evident that the theatre aesthetics of the previous generation were exhausted. It seems more and more clear, Chris Salter opined, that the once hip antics of young enfants terrible taking the theatre by storm and deconstructing the classics is by now a tired paradigm (1996:22). In 1997, the tide inevitably began to turn, and in a stinging polemic that year, Adolf Dresen got straight to the crux of the problem: The theatres are disregarding not only their actors, but also their writers, and then are surprised when, unlike in England, plays are no longer written. The directors, who no longer know what to do with their addiction to originality, endorse themselves as lords of the theatre, not as creators of ensembles, but as rulers of hierarchies. Just as before, directors are still making theatre for critics, not actors for spectators. (1997:16) The theatre practices of the 1968 generation of playwrights had led to an increasing abstraction from the fundamentals of drama, to the extent that Gerda Poschmann, in her book Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext (Beyond the Dramatic Theatre Text; 1997), was able to demon-

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strate that plots, characters, and dialogue no longer served as necessary preconditions for contemporary theatre. Simone Schneider has since referred to this process as the vanishing tradition (Tradition des Verschwindens), in which a play is steadily reduced to nothing by the gradual expulsion of meaning, content, drama, experience, bodies, and reality from the theatre (Schneider 1999). The 1997 Berlin Theatertreffen was a good index of the inertia of German playwrighting. The festival was dominated by old classics such as Carl Zuckmayers Des Teufels General (The Devils General; 1946) and Wolfgang Borcherts Drauen vor der Tr (Outside the Door; 1947), and at one of the fringe discussions the panelists even went so far as to debate whether or not Brecht was the most modern author. The young German dramaturge Daniel Call decided enough was enough at this point. He reached for the telephone and invited a dozen or so young playwrights to meet at a pub in Charlottenburg in June 1997. Nine of them came: Simone Schneider, Lutz Hbner, Theresia Walser, Silvio Huonder, Kerstin Hensel, Michael Wildenhain, Volker Ldecke, Anna Langhoff, and Thomas Oberender. The saying goes that when three Germans meet, they form a club, and the outcome of Calls convention was the establishment of the Theater Neuen Typs (Theatre of the New Type [TNT]), a self-help organization for young dramatists based in Berlin. The name of the organization was an allusion to Lenins Party of the New Type, as theorized in What Is to Be Done? ([19011902] 1961). There, Lenin identified the need for a Communist Party based on principles of democratic centralism, that is, the control of the party by its members. The TNT, correspondingly, sought power for the playwrights who, historically, had always found themselves at the bottom of German theatre hierarchies. It was a writers theatre rather than a directors theatre, though directors and actors were also invited to participate, as were representatives from the Forum Junge Dramaturgie (Forum of Young Dramaturgy; a meeting point for young dramaturges to exchange ideas outside the pragmatic confines of the theatre industry) and the editors of Theater der zeit and Deutsche Bhne. The idea was to increase collaboration among authors, directors, and actors during the composition process, and thus to remedy the problem famously diagnosed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who once claimed that the biggest outsider at the theatre was the author himself. The model for the TNTas for Berlins Urauffhrungstheater (Premiere Theatre) set up by Oliver Bukowski and others in 1998was Londons Royal Court Theatre. Established in 1956, this was Britains first national theatre company and it has always seen itself as a writers theatre. During the 1990s, British playwrights were tremendously successful in Germany, with Mark Ravenhills Shopping and Fucking (premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1996) being performed at the 1998 Theatertreffen. In a sense, this was a breakthrough moment, because Ravenhill was a young writer trying to understand the world without the complex vocabulary of his parents generation. His writing was refreshingly direct, almost naivean immediate, nontheoretical response to real events in the world. Although the influential German theatre press did much to mask the fact, many young German theatre artists were already attempting feats similar to Ravenhills. Call, Bukowski, Klaus Chatten, Dea Loher, Moritz Rinke, Theresia Walser, and others were all creating simple, unpretentious theatre that flew in the face of decades of deconstruction by dealing directly with the lived world. This has to do with the change in generations, Christine Claussen explained, with the end of the 1968 era of autocratic directors theatre, with a new interest in texts; with young directors who prefer to stage their own lived realities rather than the eternal classics (1999:176). Beyond any grand design, these new plays offered a glimpse of the multiplicity of the world; Instead of History we were shown histories, human beings in their immediacy (Schneider 1999). Reflecting on the 1996/97 theatre season, Bernd Sucher was among the first to identify a new simplicity beginning to emerge on the German stage after decades of directorial technocracy. The new simplicity, he opined, is the return to the artistic virtues of the time before directors theatre. The directors no longer assert themselves above the author: they make themselves into his interpreter, equitably and self-consciously realizing their own

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ideas (Sucher 1997:20). While this somewhat romanticizes the days before directors theatre, it does show that the seeds of the TNT were already sewn before Calls initiative in June 1997. The late 1990s was a time for optimism and enthusiasm among young German theatre artists. The TNT made its first major appearance at the Mlheimer Stcketagen in the summer of 1998, and in 1999 the Ruhr Theatre Festival was initiated as a means of attracting top quality productions of European theatre art, including classical theatre and international avantgarde artists, as well as experimental newcomers from the Off scene. There were further plans for a Theatre Summer Academy in the Ruhr, designed to help young theatre artists try out new styles and techniques, and a similar academy in Mannheim was already starting to flourish. Nevertheless, critics like Elisabeth Roters-Ullrich could not help wondering, Are these new beginnings evidence of despairing efforts in the face of empty cash registers, or are they an expression of a changing self-understanding in the theatrical landscape? (1999). Ulrich Deuter, writing in Die Zeit, saw the emerging young talent in German theatre as a pale imitation of the former Off scene, assimilated and comfortably contained within the system: Much that the Off scene once worked hard for now goes under the name of Young Theatre at the established playhouses; only when something has the stamp of an official theatre company do we dare to celebrate it. As a consequence of this fixation on institutions, the term Off in this country does not characterize a theatres situation or size, but, rather, its public obsolescence. On the way into communal theatrethe only route available to good theatre artists in the long termnot a few rambunctious artists become domesticated. (in Roters-Ullrich 1999) But on the other hand, it was possible to argue that the German theatre system promoted new talent with unrivalled efficiencyas was the view of Nele Hertlin, founder of the alternative company Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin: Most of the interesting artistsafter two or three projects with a lot of success in the free alternative areasare embraced by the system with pleasure, and that is the positive way of German state theatre. Once there in these well-subsidized theatres, you dont have to worry about anything at all; the machinery may be enormously heavy but you do have a big organization behind you [...] So if anyone comes to me and asks what should I see and where the best talents lie, I say go to the Volksbhne or go to the Baracke, for the most interesting things artistically are still inside the established structures. (in Marranca and Dasgupta 2000:54) A classic illustration of Hertlins point came in 2000 with the appointments of Thomas Ostermeier as artistic director and Sasha Waltz as choreographer at Berlins Schaubhne. Previously at Die Baracke, Ostermeier had struck up a fruitful relationship with Londons Royal Court Theatre and in 1995 produced German versions of new British plays including Sarah Kanes controversial Blasted (1995) and David Harrowers Knives in Hens (1995). Although Ostermeiers adaptations opened to carping reviews, the performances themselves were packed, and Stephen Daldry, then artistic director at the RCT, was keen to sing his praises: Hes extremely clever, incredibly bright, and has distinct flair and immense energy. I think his appointment at the Schaubhne, which has a troubled history, is both adventurous and inevitablehes young and came in at a time when Germany has had real difficulty in finding replacements for the old guard of directors, such as Peter Stein, who are like redwood trees, refusing to let the sun shine in on young shoots. (in Woodall 2000:7)
David Ashley Hughes

Ostermeiers appointment at the Schaubhne represented, in the eyes of one critic, one of the most exciting developments in Berlin theatre in a decade (Woodall 2000:7). It seemed to encapsulate hope for the futurethe start of a new era in German theatre in which the crisis of the previous ten years might finally begin to resolve itself.

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A Shock to the System

The closure of the Hansa Theater in Hamburg in 2001 jolted the confidence of all who were starting to believe they were seeing an upturn in the fortunes of German theatre. After a distinguished 107-year history culminating in massive financial losses, the curtain finally fell on Germanys oldest vaudeville theatre. It was the first high-profile closure since that of the Schiller Theater in Berlin in 1993, and the first significant closure in the West of the country after numerous collapses in the East, e.g., the Freie Volksbhne and Metropol-Theater in Berlin and the Kleist-Theater in Frankfurt/Oder. The Hansa closing signaled that the theatre crisis which had begun in the East was now moving West. Established theatres in Cologne, Mnster, Freiburg, Aachen, Frankfurt/Main and Hannover began to find themselves under considerable pressure to downsize, and by 2002 it was estimated that over 12 percent of all theatre jobs (6,000 in a sector of 45,000) had been lost nationwide since 1992. Dance professionals suffered particularly badly in the latest round of cutbacks as dance divisions were abolished at theatres in Cologne, Weimar, Bochum, Frankfurt/Main, and the Comic Opera in Berlin. In 2002, the Mitteldeutsches Theater in Wittenberg was forced to close and the GRIPS Theater in Berlin came close to insolvency. When the Berlin Senate announced the municipal budget for 2002/03, it promised that there would be no closures of theatres, opera houses, or museums. Not everyone was convinced, however. The good news about the averted death of Berlin theatre has a flip side, commented Jrg Lau in Die Zeit: The stages are left alone with a structural problem that will consume them from the inside sooner or later. The axe may not have fallen, but the starvation continues (Lau 2002). As it turned out, in fact, the axe did fall for the Schlosspark Theater and the Hansa Theater in Berlin. Both had their subsidies canceled and were forced to close, only to be reopened under private ownership the next year. There was also less money for important cultural organizations such as Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek (which supports all aspects of German filmmaking), the Friedrichstadtpalast (Europes largest revue theatre) and the Knstlerhaus Bethanien (which supplies grants to up-and-coming artists). But any savings made here would surely have been a drop in the ocean compared to the 27 million needed to cover the losses made by the citys three opera houses, or compared to the massive costs of renovating the citys Museum Island, or, for that matter, the estimated 300 to 400 million needed to refurbish the citys main theatres and opera houses. For Peymann, it was obvious that federal intervention was necessary: Of course something fundamental has to change. The government cannot keep shirking its responsibility for the culture of the capital. The State Opera and the Deutsches Theater are national institutions and must be run at the federal level. Otherwise no end to the problems is in sight. (in Ehlert 2002) Almost in answer to Peymanns call, Federal President Johannes Rau assembled a special committee to develop a new consensus on the direction of German theatre and opera. In an interim report of 11 December 2002, however, the committees findings were muddled. The report argued for a radical overhaul of the existing theatre system while simultaneously wanting to preserve ensemble and repertory as its core ingredients. Despite calling for modernization of German theatre structures so as to allow more autonomy, less bureaucracy, and more planning reliability with sufficient financing (Rau 2002), the source of this sufficient financing also remained frustratingly moot. In 2003, the German theatre crisis worsened almost month by month. Jrgen Flimm, in his capacity as president of the German Stage Federation, claimed at the start of the year that managing directors were powerless to effect change, and accused those who could make a differencecultural politiciansof cowardice. Pointing to the Zurich Operas decision to outsource a good 60 percent of its stage designers and technicians, Flimm complained about a law preventing German companies from doing the same, and lamented the fact that actors,
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dancers, and singers had to be dismissed instead (see Corsten 2003). In March, Paul Esterhazy, director of the Stadttheater in Aachen, announced that he would not be renewing his contract at the end of the 2004/05 season; his decision was a protest against the reduction of the citys cultural allocation from 15m to 10.25m, which, he claimed, made it impossible to keep the theatre running as a two-branch concern. Also that month, SPD Finance Senator Thilo Sarrazin announced that the total budget for the three Berlin opera houses was to be cut from 113m to 80m, and that the four state theatres in the city would have to make do in future with 30m instead of 48m. Pointing to closures, Sarrazin claimed, with the blunt logic of an accountant, One less theatre and opera house would not damage the quality of our culture, but would help our finances (in Koch and Walter 2003). The Berlin Theatertreffen in May did little to hide the mounting misery: The noose is tightening, the theatres are being strangled, noted Peter Michalzik in his review of the festival (2003:9). In June, it was announced that in Frankfurt both William Forsyths Frankfurt Ballet and the Theater am Turm, one of Germanys most innovative experimental theatres, were to be discontinued at the end of 2003/04. Temporary relief from the crisis came in July, when Secretary of Culture Christina Weiss let it be known that the government was to assume the financing of Berlins Academy of the Arts and German Cinematheque Foundation at a combined cost of 22m a year. Of this, 3m was then to be used to set up a new Opera Foundation that would help to consolidate the citys three opera houses in areas such as technical workshops and marketing, thereby creating annual savings in the region of 10m. Michael Schindhelm was unaware at the time that he would be chosen to spearhead the new Foundation. For him, the real task was not just to save money, but also to invest it in the right areas. He called for less investment in hardware, i.e., infrastructure and buildings, and more in software, i.e., human beings, warning today we are confronted by the great danger that while we spruce up our theatre building, nothing more is taking place inside them (in Bollmann 2003:6). In his view, further mergers in Thringen were inevitable, as were more closures, unless the powerful hand of the state were to intervene. On 3 October 2003, the protest action Theatreland Is Being Burned Down5Against Cultural Cutbacks took place in the Schiller Theater in Berlin. Commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the closure of that theatre, the action was intended to draw attention to the increasing existential threat to German theatre in general. It resulted in a manifesto containing the following plea: Theatres are places of active remembrance: here the past becomes present in the question of our future. Here are tales of mans hopes and dreams, of defeats and insurrections, of the yearning to shape ones own life. If we cede language, movement, and music to those who only have the economic principle of added value and audience ratings in mind, we must not be surprised if the human scope for design becomes submerged in this frosty concern. In the face of the danger to the existence of theatres, we call upon municipalities, states, and the federation to join us in doing everything to retain these enclaves of risk, invention, creative dispute, and productive discussion, the happiness of the moment. (Khuon 2003:K7) Getting such a diverse collection of actors to cooperate, however, proved an impossible task as a December initiative to unite the federal Cultural Foundation with that of the various states ended in failure. In 2004, Green politician Antje Vollmer organized and chaired a meeting of Berlin theatre professionals in the Bundestag to debate The Future of Berlin Theatre (Vollmer 2004). It was the fourth such meeting that Vollmer had organized, and the discussion was heated. Peymann, for example, argued that since huge sums of money had been made available for investment in
5. Theaterland wird abgebrannta pun on Vaterland ist abgebrannt, a famous line from a protest song of the 1930s.

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government buildings, there should certainly be more investment in the theatre. Seizing his platform, Peymann polemically reported on the woeful financial state of the Berliner Ensemble: In 2005 we will be insolvent, and I am happy to repeat that here in the Bundestag. In 2005 we at the BE will definitely be insolvent, because the nine million Euros we have to save cannot be saved (in Vollmer 2004). Amelie Deufelhard, the artistic director of the Sophiensle, and Matthias Lilienthal, managing director of the Hebbel am Ufer GmbH, accused the politicians of cynically enforcing excessively demanding and insecure working conditions in their theatres. The journalist Michael Lages asked for a political consensus on what German theatre was supposed to be in the first place. Adrienne Goehle, curator of the Berlin Kulturfond, spoke of the panic that Berlin theatres would be forced to consolidate in much the same way as the Berlin opera houses. Carl Hegemann, the only dramaturge at the Volksbhne (which once employed three), claimed that subsidized theatre could only continue for another 10 years in its present condition, and that the iron logic of economic necessity will kill this luxury at some point. And yet, despite the deepening crisis, there was a surprising consensus that the quality of Berlin theatre had actually improved in recent years. The big four theatres (Volksbhne, Berliner Ensemble, Schaubhne, Deutsches Theater) reported increased productivity and attendance figures of over 80 percent, having added various in-house programs to boost their profile. Meanwhile, smaller organizations without fixed ensembles, such as the Sophiensle (founded 1996) and the Hebbel am Ufer (founded 2003), managed to produce numerous projects on the back of minimal resources (see Mller 2004:17). The Berlin theatre scene thus remained reliably irrational, to use Dieter Stolls phrase, paradoxically offering the highest quality productions while lurching from one crisis to another (Stoll 2002). In Bremen, the situation was more predictable. After running chronic deficits for years, the Bremer Theater found itself with a total debt of 4.7m and no cash to pay its staff at the end of 2005. Despite making annual budget cuts of 7.5m since 1994, the theatre had still vastly overspent. A recent refurbishment of the building, for example, finished 820,000 over budget, 500,000 of which had not been authorized by the supervisory board and was made subject to an inquiry. The theatres commercial director, Lutz-Uwe Dnnwald, was fired without warning and is now suing for unfair dismissal. Bremens state senate, represented by Jorg Kastendiek, offered to provide the theatre with a 1.9m bridge loan so that the employees could be paid their wages for October, but only on the condition that the employees renounce their rights to a 13th-month salary and holiday money. Klaus Zehelein, president of the German Theatre Association, branded the proposal an outrage and expressed disbelief that a public institution could go bust. Yet as a limited company, the four-line house (its program features opera, dance, drama, and youth theatre) was in no way immune to insolvency and liquidation. It was forced to accept the state senates offer, plus another 4m loan to guarantee the payment of salaries until April 2006. Now there are plans to merge with the nearby theatre in Oldenburg, although these have been branded as ludicrous by Zehelein for logistical reasons. It could also be added that, as the 10th-largest theatre in Germany in terms of visitors, the Bremer Theater deserves to remain independent. Concurrent with the crisis in Bremen, Thomas Ostermeier announced that the Schaubhne in Berlin may have to close at the end of the 2006/07 season on the grounds that the level of artistic performance could not be maintained under sinking subsidies. A cut of 600,000 had just been made, reducing total subsidies for the theatre to 11.68m, with the result that its dance line would, rightly or wrongly, be abolished. This prompted renowned choreographer Sasha Waltz to announce her resignationher much-vaunted collaboration with Ostermeier having not repaired her precarious position as everyone expected in 2000. Looking back to those heady times, it is sad to see what little became of the Theater Neuen Typs and other such initiatives by young theatre people. Unlike Londons Royal Court Theatre, the TNT was never state funded and so struggled to establish itself. Despite its brief blossoming in the late 90s, it made such little impact in the new millenium that, in 2005, a new organization appeared calling

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itself Berlins First Authors Theatre (Das Erste Autorentheater Berlin). Its founder, Klara Hfels, expressed the same sense of delight that TNT members had some seven years previously: I have never experienced authors having such opportunity to participate in the composition process (in Rler 2005:14). The new authors theatre saw itself as a place for engaged likeminded actors to collaborate with authors looking to effect change. Its original plan was to stage its performances at the Rixdorf Ball House in Neuklln, but this required obtaining funding from the Berlin Senate. As it turns out, the theatre has led a nomadic existence, and on 7 May 2006 it issued a desperate plea on its website: We did not want to ask for donations. Unfortunately, we are forced to do so. As with the TNT, the First Authors Theatre has remained financially marginalized, making it extremely difficult for promising German authors to come to the fore even though the dearth of new talent is now old news. As long as there are no really good authors in Germany, Peter Zadek recently told the Frankfurt newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), there can be no good theatre here (in Woodall 2005:13). The lack of a prominent authors theatre in Germany prompted another bizarre episode at the Berliner Ensemble at the start of 2006, when famous playwright Rolf Hochhuth (age 74) announced to the press that he had fired Peymann (age 68) as the Ensembles managing director, while neglecting to mention the fact to Peymann himself. Hochhuth accused Peymann of using the house innumerable times for purposes which had not in the least to do with either art or theatre, for instance staging jubilee celebrations for the CDU (in Kirschner 2006). Wanting to restore the Ensemble to its Brechtian glory, Hochhuth demanded that Peymann be replaced with Brechts granddaughter Johanna Schall, who was currently directing at the Volkstheater in Rostock. Peymann was understandably shocked, not least because his contract was with the state of Berlin and not with Hochhuth. The reason why Hochhuth thought he could fire Peymann was that, in 1996, he was a founding member of the Ilse-Holzapfel Stiftung, which owns the rights to the home of the Berliner Ensemble, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. But in March, Peymann called his lawyers, and Hochhuth was ultimately forced to withdraw to Brandenburg. It was another sorry moment in the recent history of the Ensemble, with two men, each past their heyday, merely causing embarrassment for themselves as well as their theatre. There was more doom and gloom at the start of the year as the Hansa Theater in Berlin went into insolvency. Having had its public subsidies fiercely cut back in the late 90s, the theatre closed temporarily in 2002 before reopening under a private sponsorship deal with the marketing firm Kooperationspark. But during a run of guest performances by Angelika Milster in December 2005, the theatre wrote to the press (not to Kooperationspark) announcing its imminent closure. From that moment on, director Christian Schnell could no longer be contacted by telephone, and insolvency proceedings were begun against the theatre in February. The closure was salient, paradoxically, for being so unremarkable: having played host to such famous actors over the years as Brigitte Mira, Harald Juhnke, Edith Hancke, Heinz Erhardt, Eddi Arent, and Ilja Richter, the theatre suddenly bowed out with barely a whimper. The episode certainly raised questions about the effectiveness of sponsorship in the theatre, an issue that also came to the fore at the German Stage Federations annual general meeting in May. There, Andreas Mlich-Zebhauser, managing director of the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, defended sponsorship as a means of financing German theatre. On grounds of cost efficiency, he also called for fewer performances and blamed the vanity of managing directors that coproductions were not realized more frequently. His views, however, were not well received, and he was admonished by president Zehelein, Pamela Rosenberg from the Berlin Philharmonic, and HansHeinrich Grosse-Brockhoff, Dsseldorfs secretary of state for culture. One of Michael Schindhelms first acts as General Director of the new Berlin Opera Foundation in April 2006 was to announce that planned savings of 9.2m by 2008/09 could not be achieved (even though the Opera Foundation was originally meant to create savings of 10m

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per year). The timing of his announcement was no accident. Pointing to approaching local elections in September 2006, he claimed, There is a political vacuum in which nothing gets decided anymore; rather everything is geared toward the election campaign. In this situation, concrete ideas are immediately talked down. I highlighted the problems in April quite deliberately in order not to give the impression that I wanted to manipulate the election campaign. The Opera Foundation has to be a cross-party project. (in Dssel 2006:13) Schindhelms comments make clear just how difficult it is to save money in German theatre, even with government support. In a sense, there is a parallel between the blockage of theatre reforms and the stalled federalism reform in Germany. Both are urgently necessary, and it is the mandate of Germanys new CDU/SPD government to see them through. Fiscal orthodoxy, it is said, is what Angela Merkels grand coalition will really be about. So it should be no surprise if somewhere down the line, Germanys heavily subsidized theatre scene is made to feel the pain [] There is little doubt that the scene is facing a shakeout of substantial proportions. (Naatz 2005:8)

What Is to Be Done?
The German theatre crisis, which began in the early 1990s, shows little sign of abating. In May 2006, Georg Patzer summed up the current state of affairs: All too clearly, the cards are on the table: German communal theatre is under threat. Numerous politicians see no other way of saving money than starting with the theatre. It is said to be too cumbersome, too ineffective, too expensive, and not even that important as a cultural institution. They come up with ideas such as financing through sponsorship, reducing the size of ensembles, merging theatres, or even closing them. (Patzer 2006:8) With further cuts of up to 25 percent expected in the coming years, commentators have begun to pose some fundamental questions of German theatre. Christian Henkelmann, for instance, recently had the audacity to ask, Are expensive fixed ensembles still the appropriate form for communal theatre in the 21st century? In a global cultural economy that is mobile worldwide, are not guest performance houses the theatre form of the future? (Henkelmann 2006). Rita Gerlach went even further by addressing the unquestioned assumption behind most of the German debate about theatre funding, that only the state-funded communal theatre system can guarantee high quality. Her findings were that neither the claim that state-funded theatre guarantees good theatre nor that commercial theatre automatically implies a loss of quality to mass tastes or the like holds true (Gerlach 2006). And here we come to the key point: while German theatre managers, union leaders, and critics have expended a lot of time and energy berating cultural politicians for reducing theatre budgets nationwide, they have not done enough to find alternative sources of funding in the private sector. Admittedly, this is easier said than done, but at the same time there can be no denying the ingrained culture of entitlement that the reliance on the public purse has forged in German theatre. For most German theatres, ticket sales typically cover no more than a tenth of their running costs and private sponsorship is almost negligible; the bulk of their funding instead comes from the 2 billion distributed by regions and municipalities each year. So, as the Berlin senator for culture, Peter Radunski, recognized in the mid-90s, When the state can do no more, but citizens want to have the cultural facilities, they must get involved privately (in Dresen 1997:13). The moaning of German theatre stars from the 1968 generation in particular has grown tedious and counterproductive. Peymanns denigration of the state for investing heavily in new government buildings while scaling back theatre subsidies, for instance, misses the obvious point

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that symbols of a new state and a reunified nation carry enormous cultural value, whereas German theatre has been overprivileged for centuries in comparison to other countries. Schindhelms call for greater intervention at the federal level to support even small theatres in the East, similarly, misses the mark by a distance: the state should be devolving its powers, not increasing them. Meanwhile, the ironclad principles While German theatre managers, union of organizations such as the trade union ver.di. and leaders, and critics have expended a lot the German Stage Federation, headed by Klaus Zehelein, have been equally unhelpfultheir outof time and energy berating cultural and-out resistance to sponsorship and mergers, for politicians for reducing theatre budgets example, has left scant room for negotiation and nationwide, they have not done enough has tended to impede necessary change. What makes the complaining of men such as Peymann, to find alternative sources of funding in Schindhelm, and Zehelein all the more irritating the private sector. is that, as managing directors of large stages, they are paid handsomely for making little significant difference. Despite his reputation for crisis management, Schindhelm never managed to move audiences much above 60 percent during his five-year tenure at Basel, and episodes like the Hochhuth farce have done nothing to enhance Peymanns standing. There is, finally, something ironic about this generation of leading directors, all of whom were molded by the 1968 ethos of democratizing cultural institutions, now fighting tooth and claw to preserve existing privileges in the theatre. Once we get past the facile breast-beating of those in charge, we begin to see that the German theatre crisis is not as apocalyptic as may first appear. Yes, there have been two or three high-profile closures in the last 16 years, but other good theatres have opened (most notably, the Hebbel am Ufer), and Secretary for Culture Weiss was correct when she said in December 2003 that closures happen only in exceptional circumstances. Far more common has been managing directors overstating their case in the attempt to win more money from the state take Peymanns forecast, for example, that the Berliner Ensemble would definitely be insolvent by 2005, or Ostermeiers transparent scaremongering about the imminent closure of the Schaubhne. Of course, it can be argued, as Reinhard Brembeck has, that the relative lack of closures merely masks a more deep-seated problem: Since communal theatre is a nice but ultimately voluntary offering, local politicians are increasingly prepared to starve their theatrical institutions of funding. Radical closures, however, are tried only seldom; as a rule, they bring a city negative publicity, while the clandestine withdrawal of funds has the advantage that the theatres themselves can appear complicit in their own (threatened) disappearance. (2005:13) German theatres are being starved of public funding. But as the 2004 debate on the Future of Berlin Theatre showed, less money is not necessarily incompatible with higher quality offerings. Besides, is there always less money? Berlin, because of its special status as capital city, has been awarded more and more federal aid in recent years (now in the region of 428m annually, compared to 375m provided by the municipality), while the cultural budget in North Rhine Westfalia increased by one fifth during 2004/05 and is set to keep rising in the coming years. As Pter Fbri, then president of the International Theatre Institute in Hungary, entitled a speech to German theatre professionals in 2003, Id like to have your troubles! (2003).
David Ashley Hughes

Regional variations aside, the structural problems inherent in the German theatre crisis do mean that things will continue to get worse unless substantially more private funding is found and fast. Calls for radical, sweeping change, however, such as that made by Federal President Raus special committee in 2002, are unrealisticthe system is far too diffuse and fragmented for such a general overhaul. Instead, each theatre will have to assume significantly more

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responsibility for its own funding and stop looking to cultural politicians to provide a panacea. One of the key moves here will surely involve turning theatres into limited liability corporations, like the Theater des Westens (Theatre of the West) in Berlin, in order to free them from ever increasing Flchentarifvertrge (labor agreements defined across a spatial area such as a state) and to allow them to make company agreements (Haustarifvertrge) instead. In 2000, Jrgen Flimm estimated that, at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, 8m out of a total budget of 29m could be saved in this way, while still leaving the repertory and the ensemble untouched (see Merschmeier and Wille 2000). This would only be the first step, however. More important for the long term would be to attract private sponsorship and to improve in-house operational efficiency. As unsavory as this may sound to those idealists who still see the theatre as antithetical to economic practice (recall the Theaterland manifesto above), it is a necessary step in safeguarding the future of German theatre. It may not even be as hard to find sponsorship as one might first suppose. The institution of theatre in Germany, thanks to its proud and distinguished history, carries great cultural weight and is held in high esteem even by nontheatregoers. According to a recent survey, for instance, 80 percent of Germans opposed theatre closures even though one-third of seats remained unoccupied. Finding wealthy individuals and organizations with the will to support German theatre is hardly an insurmountable challenge, as the swift reopening of the Schlosspark Theater and Hansa Theater in 2002 demonstrated. Skeptics will argue that the recent closure of the Hansa Theater for the second time undermines the case for sponsorship in German theatre. To this, I would venture to reply that private investment alone is not sufficient to guarantee a theatres long-term future. Artur Brauner, the filmmaker and property owner who owned the Hansa theatre building, blamed its operators and director Christian Schnell for attendance figures below 50 percent. While this could just be a case of sour grapes, the fact that Brauner continued to look for another group to run the theatre in 2006 does suggest that he genuinely believed in the possibility of making the Hansa Theater a success given the right operational setup to match his financial investment. And here, we might look to Bernd Lbes direction of the Frankfurt Opera for inspiration. Despite losing 7m of a 47m budget between 2003 and 2005, Lbes house remains in the top league of German operas largely because of his astute management. We no longer overpay to attract renowned guest singers, but work chiefly with our ensemble, Lbe explained, adding that this had not affected quality. Despite facing a chronic deficit of 1.3m, the Frankfurt Opera was able to triple its share of private donations, which now account for 15 percent of its total revenue. Wisely, the Opera earmarked its sponsorship money for incentives aimed at broadening its audience base, such as the opera for families program that allows one adult to take three children free, with the extra tickets being paid for by the sponsors. In sum, the house has shown how wellmanaged theatres could ride out a crisis with minimum pain and no compromising on quality (Naatz 2005:8). German theatre professionals must stop looking back to an illusory Golden Age with which to contrast their present woes. German theatre has always been hierarchical and elitist, whatever its political and aesthetic pretensions, and this is why devolving power to individual theatres is a good thing. It is now up to those theatres to seize the opportunity for greater autonomy by following the road of full or partial privatization. Some will fall along the way, but as other, younger enterprises continue to emerge, there is every chance that the German theatre landscape will remain one of the richest and most diverse in the world.
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