I would have been wise to have done some homework. In the most brutal traditions of Regietheater (‘director’s theatre’), Thalheimer was known for taking a scalpel to texts, the sharper the better. A version of Faust, staged in an empty black cube at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, presented Goethe’s hero as a self-centred egomaniac, strumming an air guitar to Deep Purple’s ‘Child in Time’. His production of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772) had boiled the tragedy down to an unremitting seventy-five minutes, the cast refusing to look each other in the eye throughout. ‘For me theatre is the last remaining public space where a discourse is dared … on the misery of the world, on the true state of humanity,’ Thalheimer told an interviewer afterwards.
At the Residenztheater, there was misery aplenty on offer. The lighting was harsh and monochrome, the set made of steel pipes resembling the wall of a prison. Theseus and Hippolyta appeared to be in the terminal stages of an abusive relationship, him clawing her breasts while she stared in mute horror into the wings. Hermia had almost certainly been raped by her father and was being pimped out to Demetrius; she and Lysander appeared to be in it entirely for the sex (which looked wretched). Puck, who spent most of the play half naked, had the belly of a darts player and the face of a crime boss. Even Nick Bottom, Peter Quince and co., usually a blessed piece of comic relief, were played as disgruntled union workers who looked as if they’d rather be manning a picket than mounting a piece of spineless bourgeois theatre.
Within ten minutes I had placed a series of private bets, which joylessly I watched myself win. Simulated rape? Check. Simulated anal rape? Check. Simulated blood? Check. Simulated semen? Check (a spume of beer sprayed across the stage). Full-frontal nudity, male and female? Check. Check, check, check. Not so much Dream as never-ending nightmare. For the first time I could recall, I yearned for there to be more fairies, perhaps even a burst of Mendelssohn.
In any case, my mind was elsewhere: still mouldering somewhere in the Third Reich. Had the Allies been so different, really? A few years after Goering’s pet Gustaf Gründgens went on stage as Hamlet in Berlin, the British-born actor Maurice Evans – now forgotten, but a huge star at the time – had created a ‘GI Hamlet’ and performed it at military bases in Hawaii. Heavily streamlined, it made the Prince (according to Life magazine) into a ‘rough-and-ready extrovert, delayed in avenging his father’s murder more by force of circumstance than by his own pigeon liver’.
Around the same time, Fleet Air Arm lieutenant Laurence Olivier, spurred on by the Ministry of Information, remade Henry V as lavish, all-colour British propaganda in 1944. The movie was dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture’ (a ‘spirit’ that required swingeing cuts to the script, including Henry’s order to his troops to kill their prisoners).
Less well-known was the top-secret British wartime plan, known as ‘Operation HK’. As a last-ditch measure in the event of invasion, Parliament would be evacuated to Stratford-upon-Avon and its members set up in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. No doubt the venue was chosen partly for practical reasons – a space of sufficient size in comparative rural safety, with plentiful hotel accommodation – but the idea of hunkering down in the home of the National Poet, deep in the heart of England, evidently provided comfort to Britain’s harried wartime civil servants.
Of course one could detach Shakespeare from the uses to which he had been put. One had to. Yet the thought that the works of Shakespeare, of all people, had become involved in all this I found both exhausting and depressing. He was the most humane of writers, the most even-handed, the most keenly sceptical of received ideas: he had an uncanny knack of finding glimmers of sympathy in the most unlikely circumstances. It was impossible to see Measure for Measure without wondering who was right: the idealistic woman who stands by her beliefs and refuses to sacrifice her virginity to save her brother’s life, or the brother who puts her in that position? The law, or natural justice? Both, neither? One couldn’t watch The Merchant of Venice without feeling for Shylock even as he drew the knife on Antonio. That was, of course, why the Nazis had such trouble staging him: he could never be as shallow and one-sided as they needed him to be. Still, I thought wearily, when it came to using Shakespeare as propaganda: a plague on both your houses.
On Sunday morning, the DSG assembled for the final time to bid farewell to each other and, at least temporarily, to Shakespeare. We had moved to the regal setting of the Altes Rathaus on Marienplatz, a white-stone, high-gabled building that looked as though it was made out of frosted gingerbread. Beneath the broad oak spans of the grand hall – a painstaking postwar facsimile of the fourteenth-century original – we sat in polite rows, listening to a financial journalist from the Süddeutsche Zeitung describe how Shakespeare had predicted the credit crunch. Listening to the rough translation whispered courteously by my neighbour, I tried to forget that this was also the hall where Goebbels had given the speech in November 1938 that led to Kristallnacht.
Music helped. In lieu of laying roses at Weimar’s Shakespeare statue, the most ceremonious portion of the event was the performance by a local choir of Frank Martin’s Songs of Ariel. Despite his English-sounding name, Martin was a Swiss composer who died in 1974, little-known outside the choral and operatic worlds, and often disregarded within them. He produced an impressive body of work, among them an anguished Mass for Double Choir (1922–26), the Petite Symphonie Concertante (1946) and an intimidating number of theatre and opera scores.
Soon after the war, Martin moved to the Netherlands and began his first opera. The text he chose was the same one Mozart had never completed: The Tempest. Der Sturm was finally finished in 1955, and premiered at the Vienna State Opera the following year. By that time, unable to get Shakespeare’s luminous verse out of his head, Martin had already completed separate settings of the five songs sung by Ariel that punctuate the play.
They were, I thought, his masterworks. To some of the uncanniest, most piercing lyrics in the English language, Martin composed music of rare absorption and wonder, suspended somewhere between the mysticism of late Ravel and the diamond clarity of Stravinsky. All five songs were remarkable in their way: Martin took childish delight in giving the basses a doggy ‘bow-wow’ in ‘Come unto these yellow sands’. But for me the finest was the second, a setting of words sung by Ariel to Ferdinand, words of agitated and haunting beauty:
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding dong.
Hark, now I hear them.
Ding-dong bell.
‘The ditty does remember my drowned father,’ responds Ferdinand in the play, flabbergasted by what he is hearing. Martin made the image absolute, draping undulating high chords in the female voices over a melodic line of phantom stillness – a shadowed corpse sunk deep beneath the rippling waves. At the close, he left the music deliberately unresolved, eerie tintinnabulations echoing around the choir before subsiding into silence.
I found it profoundly moving. As they finished, I attempted to hide my embarrassed snuffling from my neighbour.
Afterwards, with a couple of hours to spare before my train to Berlin, I drifted back through town. The afternoon was still and soft; barely anyone was on the streets. As I retraced my steps across Königsplatz, I noticed something I had failed to the day before. What had been the Führerbau – the building in which the Munich agreement was signed, granting Hitler a swath of Czechoslovakia in 1938 – hadn’t been razed along with the Temples of Honour, as I’d assumed: it was right here, massive and mournful, a monumental neoclassical structure in limestone the colour of sour cheese. There was a blank gap on the facade where a bronze eagle had hung, and telltale scars fr
om shell damage. I had seen the building, but not realised what it was.
As I walked up the steps I passed a group of ballet dancers in bubblegum-pink cardigans and legwarmers, reclining in the spring warmth. From a half-open window there came the sound of a violin sawing away. After the war, the place had been given to the University of the Performing Arts. The room where Hitler had once given dictation was now a rehearsal studio.
For all the agonising among Munich’s historians about how to incorporate the past into the present, this was one monument no one had needed to update or change. Art had got its revenge. I thought it by far the finest memorial in town.
IN BERLIN, I SHUTTLED BETWEEN APPOINTMENTS. I went to the Freie Universität to meet a graduate student who had done research into productions of The Merchant of Venice after the Holocaust. I rattled out to Spandau on the S-Bahn to visit the actor Norbert Kentrup, part of the very first troupe to perform at the not-quite-completed reconstruction of the Globe theatre in London, and heard about his return visit to play Shylock, as a German, in English. I spent a few hours in the archives at the Deutsches Theater, looking at the promptbooks of Max Reinhardt, whose experimental, high-tech productions achieved legendary status in Germany in the 1910s. (After rejecting an offer of ‘honorary Aryanship’, Reinhardt departed for the US in 1938.)
Still on Nazi duty, I spent a doleful morning in the Staatsbibliothek on Potsdamerstrasse, rootling among the personal papers of Gustaf Gründgens, Goebbels’s favourite Hamlet, for any clue as to why that play had proved so popular. The curator and I drew a blank: the files from the 1930s until the late 1940s had mysteriously disappeared.
I went over to the Schaubühne theatre in Charlottenburg several times, to see a show and re-interview the artistic director Thomas Ostermeier, whose deconstructed, post-postmodern Hamlet I’d hugely admired when I’d seen it in Berlin and London a few years earlier. The production had since become a global sensation, performed nearly 200 times and travelling to locations as varied as Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Dublin – even Helsingør, like the English Comedians centuries before. They had recently taken Hamlet to Ramallah in the West Bank, Ostermeier told me, and conducted workshops at the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp. There they had found Prince Hamlets by the dozen – frustrated and angry young men battling with the question of revenge, not knowing whom, if anyone, to trust.
What did he think German Shakespeare was all about? ‘I don’t think the Germans are good at Shakespeare,’ he deadpanned. ‘Unser Shakespeare? It’s stupid, completely stupid.’
By the time I returned to the Deutsches Theater, this time to see a performance, I felt I was clutching at straws. A friend of a friend, Ramona Mosse, had kindly offered to talk about her work on postwar political theatre; we’d settled on combining this with a new production of Coriolanus. The show was even more self-consciously baffling than the productions in Munich: acted by five female performers wearing wigs to a soundtrack of corny eighties pop music, its logic largely eluded me.
One reason it was liberating to encounter Shakespeare in translation was that he could be the best of both worlds: both ancient and modern, both canonical and contemporary. The Romantic Schlegel-Tieck now being deeply un-hip in Germany, most theatres re-translated him each time they mounted a new production. Given everything I’d discovered about culture in the Third Reich, a suspicion of received wisdoms and the classical canon was understandable. But was this still Shakespeare? I felt we’d gone over the edge.
In all the interviews I’d done in Poland and Germany – twenty, perhaps more – one line kept boomeranging back: Ruth von Ledebur’s suggestion that Shakespeare seemed to crop up at moments of political crisis or change. That was true in 1771, and true again more powerfully in 1864; it was grimly true during the second world war, when Shakespeare had been dragooned into propaganda battles on both sides, Allied and Axis. It had happened again during the cold war, with two different ideologies of German Shakespeare eyeing each other over the Berlin Wall. But why? Why Shakespeare? Why Hamlet most especially?
Ramona paused for a second over her beer. ‘You are writing about Heiner Müller, yes? I haven’t heard you mention him.’
I knew Müller’s name and a little of his reputation as an East German playwright from my conversation with Roland Petersohn in Weimar, but he hadn’t been high on my list. He was so little-known in Britain that I had never even seen one of his plays.
Ramona looked playful. ‘Ah, then you should get to know his work. He had some interesting things to say about Shakespeare. And Hamlet.’
This was an understatement, it transpired. Over a fifty-year writing career, most of it based in East Berlin, Müller had adapted numerous classics, among them Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons and various texts by Brecht, but had returned insistently – it appeared compulsively – to Shakespeare, a playwright to whom he was often compared (one critic called him ‘a sort of socialist William Shakespeare’). Müller’s 1971 Macbeth After Shakespeare blurred the roles of director and adaptor to an unsettling degree, jettisoning the Witches, cutting the text to a machine-gun twenty-three scenes and compressing the action into a cycle of never-ending violence. Despite its focus on the suffering of Scotland’s peasants, the production landed the playwright in trouble with GDR officials for its ‘historical pessimism’.
But this was as nothing, Ramona explained, to the reaction that greeted Müller’s most infamous Shakespeare adaptation, 1977’s Die Hamletmaschine (‘Hamletmachine’), which was outlawed by the East German authorities for being ‘decadent, anti-humanistic and pessimistic’. It was eventually premiered in Brussels in 1978. Allusive, enigmatic, savagely compressed, Die Hamletmaschine was a landmark text of ‘post-dramatic’ theatre, nine pages of cryptic fragments, shorn of any plot, which might (or might not) bear some relation to Shakespeare. It was now considered a classic.
Ramona’s eyes were shining. ‘It’s an amazing text, a poem as much as a play. It can be broken up and performed in any way: it’s like the ultimate distillation of Hamlet.’
The tale had a twist. Müller, far and away the most famous playwright of the GDR, had always wanted to stage Die Hamletmaschine in his homeland. In 1988, invited by the Deutsches Theater, the very theatre in which we’d been sitting earlier that evening, to direct Hamlet, Müller had decided to do so – on condition that he would also be allowed to stage Die Hamletmaschine, as a kind of play-within-the-play. Permission had eventually been forthcoming. The production became known as Hamlet/Maschine.
Nervous about how to direct the greatest play of all – a text, furthermore, that had been nagging at him for decades–Müller dithered. Initially he wanted to cast five separate Hamlets, one actor per act, until it was pointed out no theatrical agent would agree to it. Working closely with his designer, Erich Wonder, he nonetheless developed a concept every bit as epic, in which the production would open in a kind of ice age and slowly ripen into a scene of scorching apocalypse, as if at the end of history. Müller was determined that none of Shakespeare’s text would be cut, being played at terrifically slow speed, so it was planned to stage the show over two evenings. Eventually that plan, too, was abandoned, but the performance still lasted a colossal seven and a half hours, beginning at 4 p.m. and ending near midnight.
As so often in German Shakespeare, history was waiting in the wings. When Müller and his cast went into rehearsals in August 1989, few realised that the GDR was beginning to topple. Yet when Hungary removed its border restrictions later that month, thousands of East Germans fled. Rallies sprang up in many cities, notably Leipzig, where police refused the GDR leader Erich Honecker’s orders to clamp down on protestors chanting ‘Wir sind das Volk!’ (‘We are the people!’). When the fortieth anniversary of the GDR came round on 7 October, many feared that tanks would be on the streets. Miraculously, they failed to materialise.
Müller – a committed socialist who wanted to reform East Germany, not end it – did his best to plough on with
rehearsals, but actors and technical staff kept disappearing to participate in protests. Gradually it became clear that, whatever they did on stage, it would be interpreted as a comment on a failing, flailing regime. On 4 November 1989, nearly a million people crowded into Alexanderplatz, a mile or so east of where Ramona and I were sitting, to demand change. Five days later, on 9 November, people began to stream across the opened Berlin Wall.
When Hamlet/Maschine finally had its debut the following March, a week after the GDR’s first free elections, many saw the production as a requiem for a failed state. In the final days of rehearsals Müller, acknowledging that there was no way of keeping politics at bay, suggested that the invading Norwegian prince Fortinbras–who entered wearing a stiff business suit – was ‘the ghost of Deutsche Bank’.
Ramona’s smile was enigmatic. ‘So I don’t know whether this answers your question. Maybe there are no answers. I don’t think this is what Müller intended, to put Hamlet on stage as the GDR ended. But it is true – Shakespeare has a habit of cropping up in Germany at strange moments in our history.’
Deutschland ist Hamlet yet again: I hadn’t reckoned on the phrase being so absolute. As a ten-year-old I’d visited Germany myself on a family holiday just after reunification, and walked around saucer-eyed at the battered Trabants cluttering the streets and the new white satellite dishes mushrooming on decayed apartment blocks. Eager for a piece of history, I’d lifted a chunk of cladding from an abandoned watchtower near the border, and told myself it was as good as having my very own piece of Wall.
I sorely wanted to find out more about Müller, Hamlet and Die Hamletmaschine. But I had a flight to London the next morning.
‘Then come back. How long to Berlin? An hour and a half, two hours?’ Ramona rolled her eyes. ‘Pffft, you British. You’re so terrible at travelling.’
Worlds Elsewhere Page 13
