Archaeology of the Political Unconscious: Theater and Opera in East Berlin, 19671977

This book investigates the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to argue how its theater 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 Brechts oeuvre and repurposed them for their postfascist society: Uta Birnbaums 1967 Man Equals Man at the Berliner Ensemble, Joachim Herzs 1977 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Komische Oper, and Heiner Mullers 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 books critical investigation of culture and political legitimacy in the shadow of Germanys fascist past resonates beyond the Iron Curtain into the twentyfirst century. Its final chapter examines how performative artifacts influence the process of political legitimation in more recent history, ranging from Checkpoint Charlie tourism to the January 6, 2021 US insurrection.

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