Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre

Table of Contents (PDF)

While it is common knowledge that Jews were prominent in litera-ture, music, cinema, and science in pre-1933 Germany, the fascinating story of Jewish co-creation of modern German theatre is less often discussed.
 

The essays in this stimulating collection etch onto the con-ventional view of modern German theatre the history and conflicts of its Jewish participants in the last third of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries and illuminate the influence of Jew-h ethnicity in the creation of the modernist German theatre.

"Jeanette Malkin and Freddie Rokem bring together a detailed and fascinating set of essays that document and analyze the role of German Jews as co-cre-ators of modern and avant-garde culture in the periods of the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic.
 

Combining methodologies from theatre history and cultural studies, the essays collectively reveal the creative contribution of Jewish theatre artists such as Otto Brahm, Max Reinhardt, and Leopold Jessner and detail their newly emerging experiments as they intersect with Jewish culture and education. Malkin and Rokem's excellent introduction and epilogue foreground questions about Jewish cultural identity formation with a present-time focus on how we remember and honor the creativity of that era.
 

An important and engrossing collection!" -Janelle Reinelt, University of Warwick

"This commendable collection of essays illuminates a hitherto surprisingly neglected subject, the role of Jews in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatre, especially their role in the major experimental movements within that theatre.
 

This collection demonstrates that far from representing a marginal or separatist theatrical tradition, German Jewish theatre artists were at the heart of German theatre activity and innovation during this im-portant period and were responsible in large measure for much of its most distinctive work.
 

"An excellent and informative study." -

Marvin Carlson, author, Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century