Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [53]
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Theatre
With more than 6000 stages across the country, Germany is a paradise for the theatregoer. Most plays are staged in multipurpose theatres (opera and music will often be performed there, too) and are subsidised by the state. The average theatre in the network of city, regional and national spaces will put on about 20 or more plays each year.
Masters of the Enlightenment who frequently get a showing include Saxony’s Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81); Württemberg-born Friedrich Schiller, who features especially strongly in Weimar’s theatre landscape today; and, of course, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who tinkered with his two-part Faust for 60 years of his life and created one of Germany’s most powerful and enduring dramas about the human condition.
Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1813–37) is another popular piece and, having anticipated Theatre of the Absurd, lends itself to innovative staging. In 1894 the director of Berlin’s Deutsches Theater hired a young actor, Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), who became German theatre’s most influential expressionist director, working briefly with dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Both men went into exile under Nazism – Brecht to try his hand at a couple of Hollywood scripts and to answer for his Marxist politics before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy-era witch hunts. Brecht’s Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo; 1943/47) was rewritten with a new ending after atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was first performed in Beverly Hills.
The Augsburg-born dramatist (his birthplace is a pilgrimage site today) returned after WWII to East Berlin and in the 1950s he created the Berliner Ensemble, a venue that produced his plays and became one of the capital’s most vibrant theatres. See the boxed text, Click here, for more details about Brecht.
Heiner Müller (1929–95), a Marxist who was critical of the reality of the GDR, became unpalatable in both Germanys in the 1950s. In the 1980s, existential works such as Quartet (1980) earned him an avant-garde label. In the 1960s, Berlin director Rudolf Noelte (1921–2002) took centre stage as the master of postwar German theatre.
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Read up-to-date reviews of the latest plays by German playwrights and other cultural offerings at www.goethe.de/enindex.htm.
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Directors like Peter Stein (b 1937) have earned contemporary German theatre its reputation for producing classic plays in an innovative and provocative manner. Part of the so-called Junge Wilde (wild youth) movement in the 1970s and 1980s, Stein founded Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre as a collective in 1970 (even the cleaner had a say as to what went on); today it is one of Germany’s best.
Also in the capital, Berlin-born Frank Castorf (b 1951) is arguably Germany’s most dynamic contemporary director, heading up Berlin’s Volksbühne and piecing together innovative productions in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Christoph Schlingensief (b 1960) is the best known of Germany’s new breed, having staged productions at Berlin’s Volksbühne and elsewhere; he’s also active in film and action art. In 2008 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, kept a diary about the experience that is now a book, and is currently engaged in establishing a theatre in Africa (www.festspielhaus-afrika.com).
The most-performed contemporary playwright is the Göttingen-born Roland Schimmelpfennig (b 1967), who has worked at Berlin’s Schaubühne and Volksbühne, as well as Vienna’s Burgtheater. Other contemporary playwrights to watch out for are Moritz Rinke (b 1967); Munich-born, Berlin-based Rainald Goetz (b 1954); Werner Fritsch (b 1960), whose dark plays portray a violent world, occasionally verging on the obscene; and Simone Schneider (b 1962).
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Food & Drink
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STAPLES & SPECIALITIES
Sausage
Bread
Potato
Sauerkraut
Regional Dishes
Seasonal