The nontraditional forms and themes known as modernism date roughly from German unification in 1871 to the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. This is also the period when Jews acquired full legal and trade equality, which enabled their ownership and directorship of theatre and performance venues. The extraordinary artistic innovations that Germans and Jews co-created during the relatively short period of this era of creativity reached across the old assumptions, traditions, and prejudices that had separated people as the modern arts sought to reformulate human relations from the foundations to the pinnacles of society.
The essayists, writing from a variety of perspectives, carve out historical overviews of the role of theatre in the constitution of Jewish identity in Germany, the position of Jewish theatre artists in the cultural vortex of imperial Berlin, the role played by theatre in German Jewish cultural education, and the impact of Yiddish theatre on German and Austrian Jews and on German theatre. They view German Jewish theatre activity through Jewish philosophical and critical perspectives and examine two important genres within which Jewish artists were particularly prominent: the Cabaret and Expressionist theatre. Finally, they provide close-ups of the Jewish artists Alexander Granach, Shimon Finkel, Max Reinhardt, and Leopold Jessner. By probing the interplay between âJewishâ and âGermanâ cultural and cognitive identities based in the field of theatre and performance and querying the effect of theatre on Jewish self-understanding, they add to the richness of intercultural understanding as well as to the complex history of theatre and performance in Germany.
Jeanette Malkin is a professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepard and Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama. Freddie Rokem is a professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance, Strindbergâs Secret Codes, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa, 2000), and Theatrical Space in Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg: Public Forms of Privacy.