About the Project

This research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, addresses the broad question of how culture and politics are to be understood in relation to the complex challenges of the contemporary era.

What follows in the project is an exploration of the performative representations of post-reunification German theatre through an analysis of the textual, visual and aural image-making of key theatrical productions throughout the 1990s. Theatre is particularly amenable to such a study. Like all the arts, it is a symbolic system that is both within and constitutive of culture, but has a liveness and immediacy that is potentially highly reactive to radical political change. As Han Thiess Lehmann has pointed out, contrary to other artforms, theatre is a mode of 'direct communication' between stage and audience. Speaking of the contemporary theatre in particular he suggests that live theatre causes audiences to 'experience its own presence sharply' (Lehmann 1997, 58). By way of contrast, theorising in print media occupies a different relation to the present, requiring as it does time for reflection and publication. Theatre is performative, bringing itself into being in time and space, and open to the changing circumstances of its iterative context. The project aims to discover the cultural impact of reunification with particular reference to theatre works that give form to a local cultural imaginary within a changing political landscape. It aims to test the hypothesis that a Wende perspective, imaginary or social consciousness is discernible in theatrical production and articulated through the analysis of selected play texts.

The study poses several significant questions. What kind of historicised narratives are to be found in German theatre since reunification? What evidence is there in the theatre of the fluidity and transformations that were taking place in the public sphere? What happens to theatre on both sides of the divided land where one has developed along the lines of western postmodernism and the other has been subject to censorship and the requirements of socialist realism? What happens to theatre when the political terrain changes?

Both scholars and artists have acknowledged the role of Eastern Europe as Western EuropeÕs other through a theory of perpetual crisis on the one hand and the process of 'demi-Orientalization' on the other. It is suggested that the east's 'fallen' status gives it an exotic aura that also suggests that reunification might be gendered (Zaborowska et. al., 2004). If so, how is the other incorporated into the same? And what of the often cited 'wall in the head', the continuing psychology of division and difference? What of the loss of the DDR and its manifestation as nostalgia, mourning and melancholia (Scribner 2003), or the collapse of communism and return of its spectres (Derrida 1994)? What new theatrical images and affects give form to the psychology of change? What genuinely new aesthetic developments occurred in response to reunification? What other influences are brought to bear on cultural production?

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