Archaeology of the Political Unconscious: Theatre and Opera in East Berlin, 1967-1977

This book investigates the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to argue how its theatre and opera stages incited artists to act out, fuel and resist the troubled construction of political legitimacy.

This volume investigates three case studies of how leading East Berlin stages excavated fragmentary materials from Weimar dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s oeuvre and repurposed them for their post-fascist society: Uta Birnbaum’s 1967 Man Equals Man at the Berliner Ensemble, Joachim Herz’s 1977 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Komische Oper, and Heiner Müller’s own productions of his trailblazing plays. In each instance, reused theatrical artifacts dialectically expressed the contradictions inherent in East German political legitimacy, at once amplifying and critiquing it. Illuminated by original archival research and translations of letters and artistic ephemera published in English for the first time, and engaging with alternative East German feminist epistemologies, this book’s critical investigation of culture and political legitimacy in the shadow of fascism resonates beyond the Iron Curtain into the twenty-first century.

This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, art history, music, German studies, and political science.

Jennifer Williams is a Fulbright Scholar who holds a Ph.D. in theatre and performance studies from Cornell University. Her research has appeared in Feminist German Studies, Text and Performance Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the Journal of Religion and Theatre.