From ‘Völkisch’ Culture to Dialectical Marxist Aesthetics: Staging Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht in the GDR

ABSTRACT The article investigates the aesthetic and political debates around two of the three historic theatrical productions of Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht in the GDR, in Thale in 1957 and in Leipzig in 1988. The stagings can be seen to represent the two opposing extremes of GDR cultural appropriation, and the shift from political propaganda in the 1950s to Marxist critical theatre of the 1980s. In this context, Kleist’s oeuvre provides an ideal analytical tool to identify how political pragmatism in many cases replaced both ideological and Marxist cultural approaches in the nation-building years, and how dialectical culture from the 1970s onwards eventually achieved the critical appropriation of Kleist’s works.