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Wilhelm Hortmann Shakespeare on the German Stage: the Twentieth Century with a section on Shakespeare on stage in the German Democratic Republic by Mark Hamburger Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxii, 497p. £45.00. ISBN 0-521-34386-0.

Written with clarity and wit, tellingly illustrated, meticulously documented, this is one of the best accounts of twentieth-century Shakespeare performance and a worthy companion to Dennis Kennedy's Looking at Shakespeare. Wilhelm Hortmann's lucid, authoritative, and humane book constitutes a guide not only to German Shakespeare productions in the twentieth century, but to the German theatre itself, and the political and social upheavals that shaped it. Hortmann shows the multiple layers of significance that underlie not only staging and acting methods or the structural reworking of texts, but also choice of translation. German Shakespearean performances have often been highly charged definitions of tragic heroism and communal, historical self in particular have been challenged and defined through performances of the tragedies and histories. The 'Shakespeare question' in Germany has always been perceived as going beyond the merely aesthetic to a much greater degree than in the countries that share the dramatist's language. The influence has been a source of anxiety and a ready means to an often tortured dissection of the national mind and its self-respect. 'We have not yet come into our own', Heiner Miiller has said, 'as long as Shakespeare writes our plays for us.' At one level the appropriation of Shakespeare was part of a relatively subtle and sophisticated process of historiography and cultural realignment. Some takeover bids were less tentative: in 1916 the dramatist Ludwig Fulda scaled new heights of cultural imperialism when he suggested that, in the event of Germany's 'vanquishing' England, his countrymen 'should, I think, insert a clause into the peace treaty stipulating the formal surrender of William Shakespeare to Germany'. And strategies adopted by German theatres during both world wars included a strong element of demonstrating that unser Shakespeare was better served by his spiritual (German) as by his material (English) fatherland. Wilhelm Hortmann and Mark Hamburger are distinguished by their ability to make equally vivid the nature of the shows on stage and the pressing circumstances that they responded to. Some productions were governed by a single, dominant directorial thought, the Regiegedanke, but this was not the only way forward. In this respect, a taste for intellectual controversy might be said to be an unavoidable component of the German Geist to an extent unknown in Britain, and the emergence of a strongly (often extravagantly) subsidized theatre sector in both the post-war Germanies simply confirmed the enmeshing of theatre art with politics. Hortmann's book should help to sophisticate traditional readings of German Shakespeares, providing as it does a strong sense of the variety and range of the alternatives available in the inter-war years: the choice lay not simply between a florid 'establishment' style and the aggressive detachment of Brecht and his cohorts, but among several possible approaches, including a 'deliberate pathos', as championed by Jiirgen Fehling, and the white-hot, politically explosive expressionism of Leopold Jessner. Some directors cultivated styles unlikely to find favour now, but which offered a distinctive alternative to the extremism of others. Saladin Schmitt offered richly decorated, 'festive' seasons that seem like better-financed, better-cast, and more thoroughly conceived versions of the festive Stratford-upon-Avon offerings of the time. Meanwhile, Otto Falckenberg created richly romantic productions on the basis of a surrender to the work of art presented again, work that was both influential and popular, but has not been so well described for English-speakers until now. Another remarkable feature of this book is its picture of theatrical life under the Nazis. Hortmann is sympathetic and judicious in dealing with this period, refusing to subject it to a second 'denazification', and reserving judgement in some cases where the more strident (if understandable) opinions of the exiled and victimized have predominated. The relationship between performances and the dominant ideology continued to be problematic and tense. In 1945, with the collapse of the Nazi regime, the theatres were soon caught between the need for the restoration of a 'dramaturgy of clarity and order' (particularly favoured by the numerous festivals established in the late 1940s and 1950s) and the wish to make a break with the past. Continuity was at once desired and suspected. Much effective and substantial work from this period has attracted less attention from observers outside Germany than the followers of Brecht, or the 'aesthetic of iconoclasm' associated with the radical directors' theatre of the 1970s and 1980s. Reconstruction, particularly where actors and directors who had worked under the Nazis as well as returned emigres were to be employed, was a politically delicate business. Hortmann gives thoughtful and detailed accounts of the post-war work of such figures as Fritz Kortner (a returned exile) and Grundgens (a 'de-nazified' survivor), and is even-handed in his description of the policies and productions of such radicals as Peter Zadek (theatre as playground), Peter Stein (theatre as laboratory), and Heiner Miiller (theatre as mincing machine).