Art and epic theater in Cold War Germany

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ART AND EPIC THEATER IN COLD WAR GERMANY

Samuel H. Adams

A dissertation presented to
THE FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY
May 2016

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………i

List of Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………..iii

Introduction: Theaters of Modern Art in Germany……………………………………….1
Tainted History: Overcoming Theater’s Nazification…………………………...13
Director’s Theater: Politics of Appropriation, Aesthetics of Resistance………...16
Theater’s Art History…………………………………………………………….28
Periodizing Epic Theater…………………………………………………………34
Images……………………………………………………………………………42

Chapter 1: Restaging the Avant-Garde in East Berlin…………………………………...43
Berlin Dada and The Proletarian Theater, 1920-1929…………………………...46
Repressing John Heartfield’s Contemporaneity in a Divided World……………64
Flickering Images of Lenin and Stalin, 1951…………………………………….71
Theaters of War and Postwar Theaters, 1955-1966……………………………...80
Images……………………………………………………………………………95

Chapter 2: Stage “Commonism”: Pop Art at the Theater Bremen……………………..109
Germanizing American Pop Art………………………………………………..120
Transatlantic Realisms………………………………………………………….134
Tom Wesselmanns “Image of the Federal Republic”…………………………..143
Andy Warhol and the Celebrity Portrait………………………………………..153
Roy Lichtenstein’s War Comics on Stage……………………………………...163
Theater, Pop Art, Television……………………………………………………169
Images…………………………………………………………………………..186

Chapter 3: “Big Brother is Watching”: Wolf Vostell’s Hamlet in Cologne……………198
“Theater is in the Streets”: Décollage in France and Germany………………...206
Body and Apparatus in Vostell’s Electronic Hamlet…………………………...220
The Barbarism of Technology………………………………………………….226
The Expanded Theater of Happenings and Fluxus……………………………..243
Authorship in Daniel Spoerri’s Stage Work……………………………………257
Conclusion: Survivals of the Avant-Garde……………………………………..261
Images…………………………………………………………………………..267

Chapter 4: “Individual Mythologies” of Gallery and Stage…………………………….275
The Salvage of Art and Architecture…………………………………………...295
Staged Space after Installation Art……………………………………………..308
Theater of Democracy, Architecture of Fascism ………………………………314
Shakespeare on the Production Line……………………………………………324
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...337
Images…………………………………………………………………………..340

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………359
i
Acknowledgments

The historical figures in this study worked at the intersections of art and theater,
East Germany and West Germany, and its writing required calling on many guides to find
the way between diverse discourses and archives. My greatest gratitude goes to Megan
Luke, my advisor, committee chair, and model. If there is historical rigor to this project, it
is thanks to Paul Lerner, my mentor and secondary advisor. Suzanne Hudson offered
guidance along the way and invaluable suggestions for marshalling my case studies into a
coherent narrative. I am fortunate for additional feedback from Stephanie Barron, Karen
Lang, Andrew Perchuk, Nancy Troy, and Katja Zelljadt.
In addition to a USC Provost Ph.D. Fellowship I am grateful for research funds
from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and the German
Academic Exchange Program (DAAD), for which Robin Schuldenfrei generously
recommended my application. Among my USC cohort, I thank Megan Mastroianni for
helping me appreciate LA, Ellen Dooley and Sarah Goodrum for hosting me during
research trips on both sides of the Atlantic, and Nadya Bair, Karen Huang, and Kay Wells
for their intellectual generosity. I am lucky to have found wonderful interlocutors in
Germany, including Matthew Cornish, Andrea Gyorody, kate-hers RHEE, Anne Röhl,
and Dorothea Schöne. In Boston, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Rebecca Kastleman, and
Elizabeth Phillips have been the most adroit readers and I thank them profusely.
I wish to thank Sally McKay, head of Special Collections at the Getty Research
Institute, for her enthusiastic help, and Josh Franco for his generous assistance at the
Archives of American Art. I thank Peter Marx for allowing me to work in the theater
ii
collection of Cologne’s majestic Schloss Wahn even during Karneval. Eva-Gabriele
Jäckl, Monika Lück, and Stephan Priddy helped me navigate the rich collections of the
Deutsches Theatermuseum in Munich. I am grateful to Zoë Schepke of the Theater
Bremen, Martin Groh of the documenta Archiv in Kassel, Werner Esser of the Sohm
Archiv in Stuttgart, Christoph Kolossa of the Staatstheater Stuttgart, and Peter Schiffer of
the Staatsarchiv Stuttgart. This project is informed most significantly by the archives of
the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, which I visited nearly every day for a year. In
particular, I thank Elfe Raasch at Robert-Koch-Platz and Iliane Thiemann at the Bertolt
Brecht Archiv. Rudolf Mast was the archivist with whom I worked most closely. Were it
not for his extensive knowledge of postwar German theater and stewardship of the
archive this study would have taken a very direction form.
With loving patience, my husband Moisès looked after my sanity and health
throughout this journey, always reminding me that it is a joyous one. His parents, Emilio
and Montse, prepared life-changing paellas while I sat writing. My parents, Velda and
George, sent encouragement at crucial moments, and my siblings, Sherry and Danny,
asked the big questions. This project stretched me intellectually, but also within these
professional and personal relationships that fundamentally nurtured it.
iii
List of Abbreviations
1

AAA Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
ADK Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts), Berlin
AIZ Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Press)
ARD Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Consortium of Public Broadcasters)
CCC Central Cinema Company, West Berlin
DTM Deutsches Theatermuseum (German Theater Museum), Munich
GRI Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party)
RAF Rote Armee Faktion (Red Army Faction)
SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party)
SI Internationale Situationniste (Situationist International)
Stasi Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security)
TWS Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln (Theater Studies
Collection of the University of Cologne)
V-effects Verfremdungseffekte (defamiliarization effects)
2

WDR Westdeutsche Rundfunk (West German Broadcasting)
ZDF Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Second German Television)

1
East Germany is abbreviated in Germanistic studies as GDR or DDR (German
Democratic Republic or Deutsche Demokratische Republik) and West Germany as FRG
or BRD (Federal Republic of Germany or Bundesrepublik Deutschlands). In studies
aimed at a broader audience, such as this one, they are written out in full.
2
Other translations such as “alienation” and “estrangement” recal Hegelian and Marxist
notions of Entfremdung, whereas Brecht’s Verfremdung suggests engagement through
defamiliarization rather than detachment. Scholars now commonly use “V-effects.”
1
Introduction
Theaters of Modern Art in Germany

This is a study of medium mixing, border crossing, and genre defiance in the
period of Cold War Germany, when such acts had grave political consequences. I follow
artists and directors through studios, galleries, and theaters, as they courageously revived
the dramaturgical and visual principles of the vowed Marxist dramaturge, Bertolt Brecht
(1898-1956), in the hyper-capitalist atmosphere of West Germany. Many of the figures I
examine lost their jobs, risked their right to exhibit art in public, and faced deportation for
claiming allegiances to various ideologies during their careers. Brecht and his scenic
collaborator, John Heartfield (1891-1968), lived through German capitalism, fascism, and
communism. Although the core of this study is the postwar mobilization of Brecht’s
legacy in West Germany, it is only intelligible through histories of the Weimar period,
exile narratives, and testimonies from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Ultimately, I argue
that democracy came to triumph on theater stages even in moments when it staggered in
art galleries and in political practice.
The figures in the case studies that follow were active in two fields of cultural
production: visual art and theater. While these were not necessarily discrete realms in
practice, they do constitute separate academic disciplines. In his sweeping 1972 survey of
scenic backdrops from antiquity to the postwar period, Karl Bachler wrote that, “the
examination of scenic design is on the disciplinary peripheries of theater studies and art
2
history alike.”
3
Bachler considered stage “décor” a physical and symbolic partition
between the audience and the fictional world of the stage. He explained that the ornate
gilded borders framing eighteenth-century European stages developed out of the display
of canvas painting in salons, which in turn was based on an historical understanding of
that format as an Albertian window into an external world (fig. 1). Despite this art-
historical notion of mimesis, Bachler nevertheless contended that stage design was so
rudimentary until the period in the nineteenth century in which modern academic
disciplines were formed, that neither theater studies (Theaterwissenschaft) nor art history
(Kunstgeschichte) developed methods or theories specific to scenic art. Throughout the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, European stage design became more
opulent and important to theories of theater, from Molière to Denis Diderot, climaxing
with Richard Wagner’s Festival House in Bayreuth in 1876, designed to overwhelm the
senses. By the beginning of the twentieth century, scenic design had become a field of
production with its own training and specialized bodies of knowledge, combining
technical craft and aesthetic theory.
Stage design was a particularly important format for European avant-gardes of the
early twentieth century. There is a significant and growing literature on stage sets by
Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Sonia Delaunay, André
Derain, George Grosz, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich, László
Moholy-Nagy, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Lyubov Popova, Xanti Schawinsky, Oskar

3
“Die Beschäftigung mit der Vorhangmalerei sowohl für die Theaterwissenschaft als
auch für die Kunstgeschichte an der Peripherie beider Wissenschaftsgebiete liegt.” Karl
Bachler, Gemalte Theatervorhänge in Deutschland und Österreich (Munich: Bruckmann
KG, 1972), 10.
3
Schlemmer, Gino Severini, Max Slevogt, and many more.
4
Stage designs by postwar and
contemporary artists, including Daniel Buren, Jean Dubuffet, Keith Haring, Alex Katz,
William Kentridge, Sol LeWitt, Robert Longo, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Christoph
Schlingensief, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, and Günther Uecker, are ripe for further
research, specifically into the appearance of their works on stage with live performers as
opposed to in the gallery.
5
David Hockney and Robert Wilson have a unique place in the

4
The related literature is expansive; here I emphasize: Oskar Fischel, Das Moderne
Bühnenbild (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1923); Gustav Eugen Diehl, ed., Berliner Bühnen-
Bildner (Berlin: Kunstarchiv GmbH, 1926); Will Grohmann, Bildende Kunst und
Architektur, III. Band: Zwischen den beiden Kriegen (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1953);
Hélène Parmelin, Cinq Peintres et le Théâtre: Décors et Costumes de Léger, Coutard,
Gischia, Labisse, Pignon (Paris: Éditions Cercle d'Art, 1956); Franzjoseph Janssen,
Bühnenbild und Bildender Künstler: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des modernen
Bühnenbildes in Deutschland (Diss: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität zu München and
Frankfurt am Main: Johannes Weisbecker, 1957); Albert Schulze Vellinghausen,
Bühnenbild und bildende Kunst (Iserlohn, 1959); Erika Billeter, ed., Das Bühnenbild
nach 1945, eine Dokumentation (Zürich: Buchdruckerei Berichthaus, 1964); Denis
Bablet beeldend experiment op de planken (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum,
1964); Denis Bablet, Esthétique Générale du Décor de Théatre de 1870 a 1914 (Paris:
Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1965); Andrew Walter, The
Theatrical Designs of George Grosz (Diss. Yale University, 1972); Denis Bablet, Les
Revolutions Sceniques du XXe Siècle (Paris: Societe Internationale D’Art XXe Siècle,
1975); Silvana Sinisi and Fausta Cataldi Villari, ed., Italienische Maler als
Bühnenbildner 1915-1930 (Cologne and Hamburg: Italienisches Kulturinstitut, 1982);
Peter Simhandl, Bildertheater: Bildende Künstler des 20. Jahrhunderts als
Theaterreformer (Berlin: Gadegast, 1993); Nora Eckert, Das Bühnenbild im 20.
Jahrhundert (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1998); Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf, Theater
of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950: A Critical Anthology (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2001); Barbara Gronau, Theaterinstallationen: Performative Räume bei
Beuys, Boltanski und Kabakov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Juliet Bellow, Modernism
on Stage: The Ballet Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Surrey and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2012); John Bowlt, Russian Avant-Garde Theatre: War, Revolution, and Design
(London: Nick Hern Books and the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2014); and Raphaël
Gygax and Heike Munder, Xanti Schawinsky (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2015).
5
Diedrich Diedrichsen offers a model of what this further research might look like in
“Epic Theater: Diedrich Diedrichsen on the Work of Christoph Schlingensief,” Artforum
(March 2011): 232-39. See also Helen A. Harrison and Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner,
Artist in the Theater: Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, Red Grooms, David Hockney,
4
literature on postwar stage production; their sustained work for opera and theater does not
lack art-historical attention.
This dissertation imagines a history of modern (twentieth-century) art in which
scenic works are seen as contributing to wider aesthetic debates. From my focus on
theater emerges a narrative of postwar art in Germany that is political, international,
intermedial, and participatory. German artists like Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Anselm
Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Rosemarie Trockel are
already recognized as having developed political and, sometimes, participatory works in
the postwar period.
6
My study of the stage, however, offers an engagement with the
categories of audience and experience that scholars have hastily jettisoned in discussions
of how artworks operate in studios and galleries alone. Above all, this theatrical focus
highlights a German aesthetic tradition in which Bertolt Brecht’s theories of
defamiliarization devices (Verfremdungseffekte, or “V-effects” hereafter) were required
reading for artists educated on both sides of the Berlin Wall.
Although artists, directors, and cultural theorists continued to study Brecht’s
seminal texts after his death in 1956, his legacy for cultural producers during the Cold
War was highly contested. For those in West Germany, Brecht’s plays—even those he

Vanessa James, Howard Kanovitz, Alex Katz, Robert Kushner, Elizabeth Murray,
Kendall Shaw, Judith Shea (Greenvale, NY: Long Island University, 1984).
6
See Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1999); Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory:
Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I/B Tauris, 2007); Rudolf Freiling,
The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008); Christine
Mehring, Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2008); Nico Carpentier, Media and Participation: A Sight of Ideological-Democratic
Struggle (Bristoll and Chicago: Intellect, 2011); Gregory Williams, Permission to Laugh:
Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2012).
5
wrote before the division of Germany—became associated with the East German
government. His oeuvre was bestowed with the radical charge of interwar socialist
utopianism and also plagued by the association with a repressive postwar regime. This
reception history in a divided Germany illuminates important turning points in the Cold
War; West German theaters, for example, boycotted his plays in moments of political
tension, such as the East German Uprising in 1953, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956,
and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
7

Even as Brecht’s students and acolytes called forward his writings and staging
devices in the service of highly visual theatrical productions in the 1960s and 1970s, they
also repressed aspects of Brecht, the historical figure. In Brecht’s dramaturgical work, he
obscured the vital role of his partner, Helene Weigel, other female collaborators. Loren
Kruger writes, “Brecht was not ideally suited to the role of anti-fascist mascot since his
political actions were not always consistent with his stated convictions. His plays, prose,
and drama exposed the contradictions of capitalist society and bourgeois mores, yet his
personal relations with his family and (especially female) collaborators have been
described as exploitative.”
8
He served the East German government at moments when its
ideologues impinged on artistic freedoms, while simultaneously enjoying international
travel and a lifestyle that appears opulent in comparison to most East Germans.
9
This is

7
See David Ashley Hughes’ summary of Brecht’s reception during the Cold War, in
“Notes on the German Theater Crisis,” The Drama Review 51.4 (2007) 139. See also
Mark Allinson, Politics and Popular Opinion in East Germany, 1945-68 (Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 54-56 and Gareth Dale, Popular
Protest in East Germany, 1945-1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 9-36.
8
See Loren Kruger, Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.
9
A recent auction of items from Brecht’s personal collection included silk robes, ivory
combs, a dozen silver and tortoiseshell pocket watches, and an etching by Renoir. These
6
not a study of that person. In this study, Brecht functions as a trans-historical concept that
was at times willfully misread by a rising generation more interested in the legacy of
didactic stage principles and epic theater’s visual aesthetic than in Brecht himself.
The four chapters focus on stage designs made for theater institutions, each
centering on roughly three productions that were discussed in contemporary German
newspapers as being significant for the development of Regietheater (Director’s Theater),
a phenomenon explained below. The directors most closely associated with Director’s
Theater drew heavily on contemporary art, either by commissioning set designs from
visual artists whose work they saw at exhibitions of contemporary art or by appropriating
iconic artworks circulating in German media. Appropriation and authorship are therefore
central theoretical frameworks for understanding these productions, their use of
contemporary art, and their contributions to discussions of Cold War culture and politics.
The pre-history of this postwar phenomenon is Brecht’s borrowing and adaptation
of texts for his theater scripts, which found its visual parallel in the montages of one of
his favored artists, John Heartfield. The first chapter explores theater productions
Heartfield designed in the 1920s, before working with Brecht, those he designed for
Brecht in East Berlin in the 1950s, and finally, his last stage designs in the 1960s. While
the scholarly attention to historical avant-garde artists working on theater stages far
outweighs that of the postwar period, this project deliberately begins with Heartfield, who
produced stage sets from the 1920s until just before his death in 1968, demonstrating how
deceptive such a prewar/postwar dichotomy is. The first chapter also includes discussions

were not the trappings of an average East Berlin home. See European Collections:
Including the Collections of Bertolt Brecht and Gerhart Hauptmann (Amsterdam:
Sotheby’s, 2006).
7
of related scenic designs by George Grosz and László Moholy-Nagy, both of whom
worked with Brecht’s onetime mentor, Erwin Piscator (1893-1966). Grosz, Moholy-
Nagy, and Heartfield projected historical film footage and photographs onto live actors,
creating moving stage designs that employed advances in electronic imaging technologies
and highlighted the potential of theater audiences to intervene in the course of history.
These light-based media transmitted images in ways that allowed for multiple historical
moments to co-exist on stage.
At the Theater Bremen in the mid-1960s, two of Brecht’s biggest champions in
West Germany, director Peter Zadek and stage designer Wilfried Minks, transformed
iconic works of American Pop art into stage backdrops. Ever since Zadek saw an
exhibition of artwork by the American Pop artist Tom Wesselmann, he and Minks felt
that Pop art’s references to contemporary culture could be translated into scenic devices
that would make classical drama relevant for postwar German audiences. A comic book
image about Nazi resistance fighters that Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein made into a
lithograph, for instance, became the backdrop, and an important narrative element, in
their production of Schiller’s melodrama, The Robbers. Theater critics responded with a
lively discourse about American Pop art, Brecht’s legacy, Director’s Theater, and Cold
War politics. This inter-disciplinary and transatlantic reception of American Pop in the
mid-1960s reveals a conflicted relation between the United States and West Germany that
was glossed by displays of anti-communist solidarity such as President Kennedy’s 1963
“Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.
The third chapter is primarily concerned with a 1979 Hamlet production in
Cologne, where Piscator’s pupil, Hansgünther Heyme, hired the artist Wolf Vostell to
8
develop a stage concept. Since the 1950s, Vostell had been a collaborator of the Nouveau
Réaliste group in Paris, artists in New York associated with Happenings, and Fluxus and
electronic music in Darmstadt. Along with Nam June Paik, Vostell was among the first
artists in Europe to gain notoriety for his use of the television as a sculptural medium. His
1979 Hamlet design involved one hundred television monitors, a roving surveillance
camera, a closed-circuit television loop, live news broadcasts, and a range of handheld
electronic devices. The stage was a site of Cold War anxieties over surveillance,
terrorism, broadcast media, and electronic devices. As Vostell revived the notion of the
mediatized body, which Heartfield and Moholy-Nagy explored in their 1920s stage work,
epic theater became the ultimate referent for contemporary concerns shared by visual
artists and theater professionals. I contextualize Vostell’s stage in light of his Happenings
and other Shakespeare set designs in Germany over the previous decade by Vostell’s
contemporaries, Joseph Beuys and Daniel Spoerri.
The last chapter follows the major figures in Director’s Theater—Peter Zadek,
Peter Stein, Klaus Michael Grüber, and Claus Peymann—to sites outside the theater
house, where they staged classical works by Shakespeare, Hölderlin, and Goethe. Their
site-specific productions are notable for their locations, which included bombed out or
abandoned factories, a film studio, and Hitler’s 1936 Olympic stadium, but also for their
explicit appropriations of contemporary installation art. A 1971 production of Peer Gynt
in West Berlin, for example, was based on Edward Kienholz’s environments and As You
Like It in 1977 explicitly quoted an installation by Paul Thek. Amid the advent of a mode
of photographing gallery exhibitions known as the “installation view,” the international
art fair, and the “blockbuster” exhibition, directors and set designers installed their own
9
stages in ways that resembled immersive gallery displays. Even when the theater moved
to alternative locations, it offered a transient and politicized alternative to the highly
aestheticized atmosphere of installation art in galleries.
The legacy and perpetual re-invention of Brechtian stage practices ties theatrical
concerns into aesthetic strategies of appropriation, Pop art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus,
installation art, and a performative critique of capitalist regimes. The four chapters
examine productions in which Brechtian theory and contemporary art came together on
stage and formed a visual mode of resistance to the aesthetic pressures of identifying
one’s practice with either communism in East Germany or the social market economy in
West Germany.
10
The productions show how Brecht’s legacy played a prominent role in
the discourses of contemporary art and Director’s Theater. In the polarizing Cold War
atmosphere of capitalism versus communism, Brecht was a name closely associated with
the latter, and so his absorption into capitalist West German culture breaks open this Cold
War dichotomy.
Studies of stage design have approached their objects from various angles:
textual, symbolic, iconographic, cultural, psychoanalytic, etc. This study attempts to
examine visual forms on stage as manifestations of resistance to dichotomous Cold War
thinking: East versus West, United States versus Germany, realism versus abstraction,
prewar versus postwar, and visual art versus theater. Each case study tackles different

10
In May 1945 the Allies defeated Germany and less than a year later Winston Churchill
referred to the division of Europe as an “Iron Curtain.” In 1949, Germany was divided
into two nations. West Germany emerged from the zones of occupation controlled by the
United States, France, and Britain, while East Germany became a satellite of the Soviet
Union. In the center of East Berlin, Berlin was divided between both states. See Mary
Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2014: The Divided Nation, 4
th
edition (Malden,
MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 111-42.
10
challenges, but all respond to a pressure to choose allegiances to specific media and
ideologies, a situation particular to artists working during the period of a divided
Germany. I take seriously the visual considerations of these stage sets, especially when
they overlapped with contemporary artistic discourse, and thus devote attention to an area
theater scholars generally treat as secondary to textual analysis and dramaturgy.
Nevertheless, I am unable to offer close, technical readings of the way artists
applied paint to canvas or rigged film projectors. The stage sets I examine from the 1920s
were lost or destroyed in World War II, while those from the 1960s and 1970s were
discarded decades ago due to lack of storage space. When a production is retired, its stage
sets are seen as serving no further purpose. Such fugitive works pose unique challenges
to historians of art, theater, and material culture. While the materiality of these objects
evades deep art-historical considerations, photographic and televisual images were given
unprecedented political import in the Cold War’s media-saturated and surveillance-
haunted atmosphere.
11
Production photographs circulated with the aim of broadcasting
the rehabilitation of West German culture to a divided world: showing Western Europe
and the United States that Berlin was still a theater capital, and competing with East
Germany over which nation had come furthest from the totalitarian past. Images of the
productions examined here were reproduced widely; the second chapter even follows an
image of one production into a theater journal published in Beijing.
The first two chapters cover the period from 1920 until 1966, while the last two
examine productions in the late 1970s. Between these two temporal segments, the

11
See “Cold War Visuality” in John Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol,
Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2013), 6-11.
11
portable video camera, which Vostell used as a stage prop, became commercially
available.
12
Theater directors also took advantage of color television beginning in 1967 to
broadcast their stage productions.
13
The one production from the 1960s I was able to
view in color proved that ekphrastic theater reviews did not always accord with what I
saw and should be taken with a grain of salt.
14
Since I did not personally attend any of
these productions, however, I try to address the experience of theater as articulated by
those who did attend, even those who misidentified colors or artists. The reception of live
theater is based on where one is sitting, how familiar one is with the plotline, and a host
of factors that cannot be simulated in an archive. In addition to photographs, video
footage, and television broadcasts, available research materials included dramaturgical
documents such as rehearsal notes, correspondence, interviews, hundreds of press
clippings, video footage, and television broadcasts. I visited most theater houses and
alternative sites in the course of research, and attended productions by the practitioners
still active and their students. Still, the videos I saw were of poor quality and I accessed
them on small monitors, in archives, with headphones. Because there is no way for me to

12
Nam June Paik supposedly bought the Sony Portapak the day it was released in 1967.
See Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2007), 142.
13
“Philips Uses Color TV for Artists’ Promotional Drive,” Billboard (11 Nov 1967): 52;
and George H. Quester on the differences between color television in East Germany and
West Germany, in Before and After the Cold War: Using the Past Forecasts to Predict
the Future (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002), 60-62.
14
Color photography was not widely used until the 1980s, and even though it was
available as early as the late 1950s, the fine-art photographers capturing these
productions more often preferred shooting in black and white. See Frances Guerin, “The
Privilege and Possibility of Color: The Case of Walter Genewein’s Photographs,” in
Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 93-158; Martha Caspers, ed., Abisag
Tüllmann, 1935-1996: Bildreportagen und Theaterfotografie (Ostfilfern: Hatte Cantz and
the Historisches Museum Frankfurt, 2010); Lynne Warren, ed., Encyclopedia of
Twentieth-Century Photography, Vol. 1 (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 719.
12
know what the embodied effect of Verfremdung (defamiliarization) felt like in the theater
house, I grapple instead with why it was important for directors and designers, and how
critics responded to it.
Of the topics that could have been a part of this study in its current form but are
not dance and opera deserve mention here. Dance has become the most significant point
of entry for art historians and curators into performativity and liveness since the 2000s.
Likewise, stage design for opera and ballet was related to the examples in this project
both in terms of overlapping personnel—such as premier danseur in Bern, Daniel Spoerri,
and ballet stage designer Nikki de Saint-Phalle—and aesthetic strategies, such as the dirt-
filled stages and cluttered café sets of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater (Dance Theater). In
addition to being a playwright, dramaturge, and director, Brecht was also a librettist and
prolific theorist of opera. This dissertation began as a study of Richard Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), as a transhistorical aesthetic strategy informing
postwar installation and performance art, but artists’ writings from the 1960s and 1970s
suggest that Brecht and “theater”— as an institution and a discursive structure—had more
currency than Wagner’s total work of art, which, earlier in the twentieth, did dominate
German discussions of performance and exhibition practice.
15
Theater is simultaneously
one of the most important cultural institutions in Germany’s long history and a ubiquitous
term among postwar artists from Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys to the curator Harald

15
Texts such as Juliet Koss, Modernism After Wagner (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010); and Ralf Beil, The Total Artwork in Expressionism: Art, Film,
Literature, Theater, Dance, and Architecture, 1905-25 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011)
have covered this territory in depth, but Wagnerian themes in postwar art remain an
under-studied area. Even Harald Szeemann’s Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk:
Europäische Utopien seit 1800 (Frankfurt am Main and Aarau: Verlag Saurländer, 1983)
privileges projects initiated prior to 1945.
13
Szeemann and critic Bazon Brock. The most significant advantage of focusing on theater
in this period, however, is the history it uncovers of how Brecht came to hold such a
commanding place among postwar and contemporary artistic theory and practice.

Tainted History: Overcoming Theater’s Nazification

During the Third Reich (1933-1945), Nazi officials made surprising compromises
in an attempt to preserve Berlin’s standing as an internationally renowned center of
theater. Hermann Göring appointed the leftist and probably homosexual Gustaf
Gründgens to the Berlin Staatstheater while Joseph Goebbels instated Heinz Hilpert at the
Deutsches Theater despite Hilpert’s Jewish wife.
16
Stage design did not emerge in 1945
unscathed, however. In 1938 the Third Reich’s official stage designer
(Reichsbühnenbildner), Benno von Arent, organized the exhibition “German Stage
Design, 1933-1936,” a survey of contemporary scenic work in Berlin.
17
In the catalogue,
Goebbels proclaimed that stage design’s “rebirth was unthinkable without a
consciousness of tradition and a joy for the future direction of the scenic arts… You can
expect a revival of this branch of the visual arts worthy of the times of [Karl Friedrich]
Schinkel and [Alfred] Roller.”
18
Schinkel’s famous stage work was an 1816 production

16
Maik Hamburger in Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century, ed.
Wilhelm Hortmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 120.
17
Erik Levi, “Opera in the Nazi Period,” in Theatre under the Nazis, ed. John London
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 143.
18
“Das Bühnenbild ist neben dem Dichter, dem Regisseur und dem Schauspieler das
vierte der bestimmenden Grundelemente des Theaters, dessen Wiedergeburt undenkbar
war ohne eine Traditionsbewußte und zukunftsfreudige Neuausrichtung der
Bühnenbildkunst… Sie läßt eine neue Blüte dieses Zweiges der bildenden Kunst
erhoffen, die der Zeiten eines Schinkel und Roller würdig sein wird.” From Joseph
14
of Mozart’s Magic Flute and Roller was known for Wagner opera designs; Mozart and
Wagner were among the most performed composers in the Third Reich. It was against
this “rebirth” of nineteenth-century Romantic naturalism that postwar scenic artists
responded. When the set designer in the second chapter, Wilfried Minks, appropriated
Pop art for the stage in the 1960s, and critics commented that he brought German scenic
design out of a staid naturalistic tradition, it was the lingering model of designers like von
Arent on the conservative 1950s to which they referred.
Theater offers an especially productive lens for the study of German culture in the
Cold War because it was one of the first institutions to rehabilitate the arts after the Third
Reich. In the second part of the 1940s, theater was staged in bombed out cellars before
rubble from the air raids had been cleared away.
19
Comedies were performed twice as
often as tragedies and classics like Shakespeare, Schiller, and Brecht were crucial
vehicles for reconnecting with pre-Nazi culture.
20
Theater created the first spaces in a
war-ravaged, post-fascist nation where people were able to gather, laugh, and be
reminded of their humanity.
21
The magazines Theater der Zeit (Theater of the Times),
which became the major East German theater review, and Theater Film Funk (Theater,
Film, Radio), were circulating as early as July 1946.
22
Theater was les burdened by the

Goebbels, “Introduction,” in Das deutsche Bühnenbild, 1933-1936, ed. Benno von Arent
(Berlin: Leonhard Preiss, Verlag, 1938), n.p.
19
Arno Paul, “The West German Theater Miracle: a Structural Analysis,” trans. Martha
Humphreys, The Drama Review 24.1 (1980): 4.
20
See Dieter Hadamczik, Jochen Schmidt, and Werner Schulze-Reimpell, Was spielten
die Theater? Bilanz der Spielpläne in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1947-1975
(Remagen-Rolandseck: Verlag Rommerskirchen, 1978).
21
Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage (1998), 181.
22
The latter soon added television to its title. See Lothar Schirmer, ed., ‘Suche Nägel,
biete gutes Theater!’: Theater in Berlin nach 1945 – Nachkriegszeit (Berlin: Stiftung
Stadtmuseum and Henschel Verlag, 2001).
15
problem of abstract versus figurative art, which art historians posed immediately after the
war, and which continued to polarize visual art discourse throughout the Cold War
period.
23

Modern artworks were banned and destroyed and it would be years before the
venues in which they could be displayed were rebuilt. Catherine Dossin notes that, “in the
smoking ruins of postwar Germany, basic living conditions were terrible and seemingly
not at all conducive to the practice of art,” explaining that museums were not being
rebuilt until 1950 and, with the exception of Düsseldorf, were not open until the middle
of the decade.
24
Exhibitions of visual art were slow to find their stride. documenta, a
large-scale art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, West Germany, was not
established until 1955, and the German art historian Walter Grasskamp argues that
documenta did not succeed in responding to the anti-modernist charges of the Nazi
“Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst) campaign its fifth iteration in 1972.
25
Were museums
to vindicate the modern art that the Nazis banned, expose inner emigration artists who
practiced in secret during the Nazi years, or focus on contemporary art while passing over
the degraded and clandestine modernist works? Theater was also faced with these

23
Some of the first voices in this debate were Willi Baumeister, a painter who described
a retreat from the surrounding world, and Hans Sedlmayr, an art historian and former
Nazi, who bemoaned modernism’s turn away from God and religious art. See Willi
Baumeister, Das Unbekannte in der Kunst [The Unknown in Art] (Stuttgart: Kurt E.
Schwab Verlag, 1947) and Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte [Loss of the Center]
(Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1948).
24
Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s: A Geopolitics of
Western Art Worlds (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 14-15.
25
This is one of the main contentions in Grasskamp’s Die unbewältige Moderne. Kunst
und Öffentlichkeit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989). See also Grasskamp, “‘Degenerate Art’
and Documenta I: Modernism Ostracized and Disarmed,” in Museum Culture: Histories,
Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994), 163-94.
16
questions but responded almost immediately, staging works of the ancient, classical, and
romantic repertory, alongside contemporary documentary theater about the Nazi period.
The best depiction of the revivification of theater within an otherwise deeply
depressed cultural sphere is a sketch by the set designer Roman Weyl for the 1946
cabaret, The Outsiders (Die Aussenseiter) at the Renaissance Theater in Berlin (fig. 2). In
a dark microcosm of bombed out Berlin, transferred to stage, Weyl depicted a decimated
brick structure. Opposite the makeshift and crumbling façade, a shattered wooden post
with barbed wire around its base supports a framed painting resembling the Wassily
Kandinsky canvasses in the 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition almost a decade prior.
26

Theater and visual art would take central roles in cultural reconstruction and discussions
of morality in the postwar period, but modern art—to the extent that it survived or was
being dug out of salt mines—was still understood in the 1940s and early 1950s as
needing walls to hang on and an intact structure to reside in, whereas theater was already
happening in even the most inhospitable sites.

Director’s Theater: Politics of Appropriation, Aesthetics of Resistance

With the exception of the productions in the first chapter, which were
dramaturgical and visual precursors of those to follow, the majority of the productions
examined here were part of a discourse around Director’s Theater (Regietheater), taking

26
See Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth Clement Lindsay, and Peter Vergo, Kandinsky,
Complete Writings on Art [1970] (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 909 and Mikhail
Guerman, Kandinsky (New York: Parkstone International, 2015), 79.
17
place in German newspapers and magazines.
27
Director’s Theater constituted a shift in
postwar theater production, and eventually opera, away from the primacy of the text and
toward the idiosyncratic vision of the director, who re-wrote portions of a hallowed plays
or dramatically re-contextualized them within contemporary debates. The visual played a
major role in this operation, as directors hired artists to aid in establishing a signature
style. Beginning in the mid-1960s, and coinciding with the second chapter of this study,
the artist or set designer often became the equal of the director, taking on unprecedented
responsibilities and using the visual to drive re-interpretations of canonical scripts.
Although the productions in these chapters transpired over the course of more
than three decades, theater critics and historians frequently compared their directors and
set designers to one another. Theater historian Michael Raab, for example, drew nearly
all of the figures in this study together, writing, “particularly innovative was [Heyme’s]
‘media-Hamlet’ developed together with the installation artist Wolf Vostell in 1979 in
Cologne. But the two most important productions signaling the breakthrough of the post-
war directors’ theatre premièred both at Bremen, and the men responsible for them could
not be more different: Peter Zadek… and Peter Stein,” adding that in both cases,
“designer Wilfried Minks introduced developments in modern art that had not previously
been seen in the theatre.”
28
While these practitioners represented different aesthetic
priorities, and drew on various branches of contemporary art that were not necessarily in
dialogue, they were part of a single discourse in West Germany that revolved around re-

27
See Ulrich Müller, “Regietheater/Director’s Theater,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Opera, ed. Helen Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 582-605.
28
Michael Raab, “Directors and Actors in Modern and Contemporary German Theatre,
1945-2006,” in A History of German Theatre, ed. Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 339-40.
18
writing canonical texts and appropriating visual art on stage. A leading German theater
scholar, Wilhelm Hortmann, confirms, “the liberation of the visual order during the
theater revolution of the sixties and seventies multiplied the possibilities... Director’s
theater was turning into designer's theater... More complex reconstructions, as in the
Tragedies and Comedies, required the assistance of powerful visual dislocations.”
29

Brecht planted the seed for Director’s Theater in 1951 when he wrote that the set
designer “is a great painter. But above all he is an ingenious story teller.”
30
A decade
later, designers in West Germany and East Germany joined directors in making important
artistic decisions, when they did not subsume the role of director completely.
31

The Brechtian root of postwar scenic design’s radical visuality is a new idea in
theater studies, which generally considers Adolphe Appia and Wieland Wagner the
forefathers of Director’s Theater.
32
The underlying notion that a director may adapt a
hallowed script and project his vision onto it is what Brecht called Umfunktionierung
(functional transformation). Brecht’s borrowing of pre-existing material in order to
contextualize it within his historical moment and renew its political potential for
contemporary audiences was itself a dramaturgical transposition of the visual strategy of
montage. Brecht and Heartfield are quoted in the first chapter expressing admiration for
one another’s work decades before their first stage collaboration in the 1950s. The mutual
impact of Heartfield’s cutting and pasting of found images from mass media and of

29
Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage (1998), 284-5.
30
Bertolt Brecht, “Stage Design in Epic Theater,” [1951], in Brecht on Theater: the
Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang,
1964), 232.
31
See Stefan Mahlke, Ulla Neuerburg, and Ralph Denzer, “Brecht +/- Müller: German-
German Brecht Images before and after 1989,” The Drama Review 43.4 (1999): 43.
32
The most vocal proponent of this interpretation is Joy Calico. See her Brecht at the
Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).
19
Brecht’s textual borrowing in the Weimar period came full circle when artists turned to
those models for appropriation in the postwar period.
Montage, Pop art, décollage, and site-specific installation art were the artistic
idioms explicitly engaged by the major figures in Director’s Theater and were taken as
visual tools for “updating” classical texts. In 2006, theater historians Ingrid Gilcher-
Holtey, Dorothea Krauss, and Franziska Schößler wrote: “That directors such as Peter
Zadek or Hans Neuenfels integrated elements of Pop art or Happenings into the scenic
form of the production emancipated the performance from the theater text and helped to
blur the line between high and popular culture. This popularization of the theater has
been intensified in the seventies.”
33
In each if my case studies, the theatrical
appropriation of artists who were already known in galleries for appropriation art
highlights a mode of authorial obfuscation within Brecht’s theory that resists
marketability, resists the Iron Curtain’s ideology of East versus West, and challenges the
prewar/postwar divide that figures such as Brecht and Heartfield’s life spans
problematize.
The key to this aesthetic of appropriation is the recognizability of the source.
Almost all of the images appropriated by stage designers in these four chapters were
circulating widely in German newspapers, magazines, television shows, books,
advertisements, and museum galleries. I look at the changes in authorship and artistic

33
“Dass Regisseure wie Peter Zadek oder Jams Neuenfels Elemente der Pop Art oder
Happenings in die szenische Gestalt der Inszenierung integrierten, emanzipierten die
Aufführung vom Theatertext und trug dazu bei, die Grenze zwischen Hoch- und
Populärkultur zu verwischen. Diese Popularisierung des Theaters wurde in den siebziger
Jahren dadurch verstärkt.”

Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Dorothea Krauss, and Franziska
Schößler, ed., Politisches Theater nach 1968: Regie, Dramatik, und Organisation
(Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2006), 11.
20
value that images underwent as they were recycled across a range of media, drawing
primarily on the mainstream magazine, Der Spiegel, the newspaper, Die Zeit, the art
journal, Das Kunstwerk, films, and television broadcasts.
34
Devin Fore writes that for
Heartfield, “it was essential to his second-order practice that the pictures and slogans in
his photomontages were already in wide circulation within the popular imaginary, and
thus readily recognizable as reproductions stolen from other sources.”
35
For the second
chapter, theater critics recognized citations of American Pop art as such. In the third,
Wolf Vostell put on stage television images, the viewing of which was a weekly or
nightly occurrence in living rooms across West Germany. The abandoned buildings
occupied for site-specific productions in chapter four, whether Hitler’s Olympiastadion or
an abandoned factory, had cultural significances that had been widely discussed over the
previous decade. When directors and designers appropriated scenes from major
contemporary art exhibitions within these spaces, critics recognized them from
installation views of those exhibitions in mainstream newspapers and magazines. The
visual tactic of defamiliarizing the readymade object or image functioned as a
manipulation of authorship because the source was already familiar. This was so for the
stage designs as well as textual changes to well-known scripts by Goethe, Shakespeare,
and Brecht.

34
In today’s media landscape, Der Spiegel could be compared to TIME magazine, the
newspaper Die Zeit to the New York Times, and the art journal Das Kunstwerk to
Artforum. That is to say, they represented mainstrem/popular reportage, sophisticated
writing from a center-left position, and the forefront in artistic production and criticism.
East German periodicals were consulted but not in such a systematic and thorough way.
35
Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 246.
21
The engagement with postwar artistic idioms in each case study offers a
particularly theatrical model of artistic authorship in which credit is passed from one
playwright or director to the next. Each production and variation of a script is new rather
than derivative. The critics and historians cited in these chapters used a range of verbs to
describe the act of adapting pre-existing material. For some, it was a poetic act of
transmitting, translating, analogizing, or metaphorizing. For others, it was a more sinister
act of co-opting, commandeering, faking, counterfeiting, and plagiarizing. Devin Fore
refers to Heartfield’s “stealing,” implying legal concerns that the scenic designers in this
study, including Heartfield, did not share. Since none of the designers in my case studies
expressed a sinister intention, I use a more anodyne range of terms, such as borrowing,
citing, recycling, adapting, appropriating, and re-authoring. These terms respond to the
severity and medium of the intervention and the context and year in which it occurred.
When the director-designer teams in each of the chapters re-wrote or erased a
playwright’s words, we no longer speak of the performance of a pre-existing script, but
the authoring of a new one. The dramaturgical principle of re-writing a script usually
took the form of changing the order of lines, inserting new locations, and deleting or
adding characters to plays by Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Brecht that were
cornerstones of the German academic curriculum. Brecht becomes particularly important
in this web of authorship because he adapted Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Livy and Plutarch
via Shakespeare (Coriolanus), Sophocles via Hölderlin (Antigone), and the epic of Joan
of Arc via George Bernard Shaw. The visual parallel of this dramaturgical principle of re-
authoring is thematized in instances throughout this study in which artists such as
22
Heartfield, Lichtenstein, Minks, and visually inclined directors did not merely cite images
composed by other artists, but re-worked the source composition into a new one.
Rarely has appropriation been as problematic for theater’s commentators as it has
been for art critics and historians. Heartfield’s recycling of imagery produced by other
artists, photographers, and designers was central to his work in film, photomontage, and
theater set design. Peter Zadek and Wilfried Minks, in the second chapter, adapted works
by Warhol and Lichtenstein as the backdrops for productions in which they also cut and
altered hallowed scripts. This scenographic-dramaturgical phenomenon offers a
vocabulary for understanding what American Pop artists were doing by displacing the
authorship of their source images’ cartoonists and commercial designers.
36

Theater involves scripts, writing, authors, rehearsals, playwrights, directors,
repetitions, and revivals. These terms lend themselves to a theorization of visual
appropriations in precisely those idioms used on stage in Director’s Theater: montage,
Pop art, Nouveau Réalisme, assemblage, and Fluxus. Durational, large-scale artworks
produced in the 1960s and 1970s are increasingly referred to with terms such as “script,”
“re-write” and “staging.”
37
The intermedial reassembly of speech fragments and image

36
One difference between these Pop artists and stage designers is that Minks and
Heartfield were not concerned with the legal ramifications of these practices, while Roy
Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring, for instance, purchased licenses from
some of the artists and designers whose imagery they appropriated. See James O. Young,
Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
95; Carys J. Craig, Copyright, Communication, and Culture: Toward a Relational Theory
of Copyright Law (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2011), 23;
Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli, eds., Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art,
Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2011), 14; Mira T. Sundara Rajan, Moral Rights: Principles, Practice, and New
Technology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 82-83.
37
These terms surfaced in my conversations with the Stephanie Barron, Caroline
Bourgeois, Philipp Kaiser, and Susanne Neubauer, curators responsible for recent re-
23
clippings on German stages was coterminous with the theorization in the early 1960s, by
Wolfgang Iser, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, among others, of the
transference of authorial agency from writers to readers. During an international tour to
Paris in 1954, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble impressed Guy Debord with precisely this
expanded notion of authorship.
38
Debord wrote in his 1956 “Methods of Détournement”
that, “the literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda
purposes… Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new
combinations… One can also alter the meaning of these fragments in any appropriate
way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of ‘citations.’”
39
Debord’s
statement gave agency not to an “original” author—indeed Debord negated the concept—
but rather to the mixer, monteur, or appropriator.
This study builds on others that have shown the Brechtian basis of postwar artistic
practices of appropriation. Devin Fore has argued that Heartfield anticipated these
practices; Tom McDonough traced Brecht’s impact on the Situationist International;
George Baker wrote about the artist Gerard Byrne’s engagement with Brecht; and Philip
Glahn examined the “Brecht effect” in American postwar art.
40
In a 2004 survey text,

maks of postwar installation art. Cited in the bibliography. For other perspectives, see
Germano Celant, ed., When Attitudes Become Form, Bern 1969/Venice 2013 (Milan:
Fondazione Prada, 2013).
38
See Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the
Language of Contestation of Postwar France, 1945-1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007),
9.
39
Guy Debord, “Methods of Détournement,” [1956] in Ken Knabb, ed. and trans.,
Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 9.
40
Fore, Realism after Modernism (2012); Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of
My Century” (2007); George Baker, Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers
(New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2003); Philip Glahn, Estrangement and Politicization:
Bertolt Brecht and American Art, 1967-79 (Diss. City University of New York, 2007).
Glahn’s case studies are Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, and Yvonne Rainer.
24
Kristine Stiles elaborated upon a discussion of work by Vito Acconci and Bill Viola,
claiming, “many video artists, especially those questioning the one-way communication
of commercial television, used Brechtian techniques to prompt audiences to exercise their
critical judgment.”
41
Baker even claimed that, “nowhere is Brecht more omnipresent than
in recent work upon the image… That this has hardly been mentioned by contemporary
art criticism seems a sign of that criticism’s political bad faith (or incompetence).”
42

These mentions of Brecht in contemporary art discourse are important for the claims this
project makes. They do the work of showing that even though Brecht himself was
depoliticized in the McCarthy era, his aesthetic strategies did not lose their purchase on
contemporary artistic practice. At the same time, the argument that Brecht was political
and that artists drew inspiration from his writings is not terribly radical. Even these “art-
historical” accounts of Brecht focus on his theoretical and political impact, and his
commentators Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Fredric Jameson, rather than on
Brecht’s actual connections to visual art. I argue that Brecht’s theory itself is
fundamentally visual, by concentrating on his and Piscator’s collaborations with visual
artists at key moments in the development of what is now referred to as epic theater
and/or Brechtian aesthetics (this slippage will be explained in the first chapter).
Other important terms for this study—intermedium, theatricality, participation,
montage, melodrama, and site-specificity—have been approached in studies of
participatory art by Claire Bishop and Shannon Jackson, the projected image by Giuliana
Bruno, the spirituality of electronics by Aby Warburg and Avital Ronell, totalizing

41
Kristine Stiles, “I/Eye/Oculus: Performance, Installation and Video,” in Themes in
Contemporary Art, Gill Perry and Paul Wood, ed. (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press and Milton Keynes: The Open University, 2004), 222.
42
George Baker, Gerard Byrne (2003), 15.
25
environments by Juliet Koss and Fred Turner, and the literature on Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s work for stage and screen.
43
While film and television are important topics
in all four chapters, and for many of the practitioners constituted further developments in
intermedial experimentation, this study’s contribution is a focus on the aesthetics of
appropriation on the theater stage itself. The screen, the gallery, and the street were sites
of Brechtian aesthetics as well, but deserve separate treatment outside this study.
Given these names—Brecht, Debord, Heartfield, Fassbinder, et al.—it may
already be apparent how deeply masculinist the discursive structure of authorship was in
postwar Germany and Western Europe.
44
This occlusion of women is also found in post-
structuralist theories of the 1960s and 1970s that supposedly expanded the concept of

43
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
(London and New York: Verso, 2012); Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art,
Supporting Publics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011); Giuliana Bruno, Surface:
Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014); Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America
[1923], trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Avital
Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Juliet Koss, Modernism After Wagner
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Fred Turner, The Democratic
Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from WWII to the Psychedelic Sixties
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013); David Barnett, Rainer
Werner Fassbinder and the German Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005); Brigitte Peucker, ed., A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2012), and others cited in the bibliography.
44
Nigel Harkness discusses the limited capacity for female authors in Harold Bloom’s
iconic Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973); see Men of Their Words: The Poetics of Masculinity in George
Sand’s Fiction (London: Legenda, 2007). Theorists and historians who have offered
explanations of the development of this masculinist discourse include Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer in the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) and No Man’s Land:
The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1988/1994); Carmen Luke, “Feminist Politics in Radical Pedagogy,” in Feminisms
and Critical Pedagogy, ed. Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore (New York and London:
Routledge, 1992), 25-53; and Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of
Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
26
authorship. Women agents, whether actors, dramaturges, costume designers, or
photographers, were vital producers and mediators in the productions examined in this
study, yet were nearly invisible to the theater audiences (except in the case of actors), and
none of the German directors or designers examined here are women. The apparent
absence of women, despite their very importance to these productions, suggests the
patriarchy of Director’s Theater and of the discourses of creativity and authorship and
which it was based.
45

The ostensible male dominance in these case studies is deceptive, however.
Brecht could not have managed the Berliner Ensemble without his wife, Helene Weigel,
a director and actress so fierce that Brecht included descriptions of her performances in
his theoretical essays. The Pop-art productions in chapter two would most likely not have
happened without gallerist Ileana Sonnabend’s introduction of American Pop art to
European audiences in 1962 through her eponymous Paris gallery. Vostell’s widow,
Mercedes Guardado Olivenza Vostell, is an avid biographer of her husband and the
director of their museum and Fluxus archive in her native Extremadura, Spain. Although
the third chapter could not accommodate the ballet stage designs of Niki de Saint-Phalle,
they appeared several times in Der Spiegel throughout the 1960s, in both art and theater
sections, with the caption Bühnenbildnerin (female stage designer), introducing German
audiences to the interdisciplinary confluences at the heart of this study.
46

45
For a nuanced discussion of femininity, creativity, and originality in the fine arts, see
Patricia Mathews, Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), particularly 218.
46
On Saint-Phalle’s role as translator between Nouveau Réaliste, Fluxus, and Abstract
Expressionist artists, see Catherine Dossin, “Niki de Saint-Phalle and the Masquerade of
Hyperfemininity,” Woman’s Art Journal 31.2 (Fall/Winter 2010), 32.
27
Women photographers produced most of the images on which this research
depended. Gisela Scheidler, who exhibited with Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Charlotte
Moorman, and Vostell, was also a photojournalist with a specialty in performance
photography. Her documentation of Zadek’s theater productions in the 1970s is
indispensable to this study. Abisag Tüllmann was a photographer for Der Spiegel and
Magnum and an important presence in Germany’s New Left.
47
She worked with directors
such as Robert Wilson, Peter Stein, and Claus Peymann, capturing Peymann’s iconic
collaboration with Beuys, Titus/Iphigenie (1969), and productions that feature in the
fourth chapter. Peymann claimed it was through Tüllmann’s photographs that he fist
began to understand his productions.
48
Within postwar German reconstruction at large,
the trope of “absent fathers” glosses the foundational role of women in balancing
pressures of homemaking and instilling morals in the family, while being discouraged
from appearing as the career women and arts professionals they often were.
49
Important
in thinking through authorial notions of appropriation, borrowing, and citation, is the way
in which those activities also rendered invisible the contributions of female collaborators.
Their invisibility to theater critics, and in the archives of the theater houses examined,
suggests that a story about authorship does not readily accommodate mediators unless it
seriously investigates collectivity and hierarchy, collaboration, friendships, and life
partners. These are avenues for further research.

47
Martha Caspers, Abisag Tüllmann (2010).
48
Verena Auffermann, et al. Theaterjahr 1999: Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz: 36.
Theatertreffen Berlin. (Munich: Prestel and Berliner Festspiele GmbH, 1999), 133.
49
Erica Carter, How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the
Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997).
28
Theater’s Art History

In terms of its engagement with contemporary art, theater is considered here as an
institution, rather than a rhetorical device or museum strategy. In art discourse, the notion
of “theatricality” is ambiguously performative, and suffers from an entrenched modernist
bias against it.
50
That critique’s contours are as follows: for Friedrich Nietzsche in the
late nineteenth century, theatricality signaled a lack of authenticity. Modernist architects
considered theatricality one of the “cardinal sins” of nineteenth-century design, referring
to a “pastiche” of past styles.
51
“Pastiche” itself is a historically problematic term, used to
describe a common practice of artistic appropriation in sixteenth-century Italy, derided in
eighteenth-century French art (Diderot refused to write the entry for the word in his
Encyclopédie), and taken up again by art critics in the 1980s.
52
In 1913, Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed, “we [Futurists] are deeply disgusted with the
contemporary theatre… because it vacillates stupidly between historical reconstruction
…and photographic reproduction of our daily life.”
53
This is an aspect of theatricality
with which Brecht also took issue, attempting a form of theater that critiqued its own
methods of reproducing reality on stage. André Breton denounced the theater as an

50
The best overview of modernism’s anti-theatrical bias is Martin Puchner, Stage Fright:
Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002).
51
See Karsten Harries, “Theatricality and Re-Presentation,” Perspecta 26 (1990): 21.
52
See Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1-8.
53
F. T. Marinetti, “The Variety Theatre” [1913], reprinted in Theater/Theory/Theatre:
The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel, ed. Daniel
Gerould (New York and London: Applause, 2000), 421-6.
29
artistic form and ex-communicated Antonin Artaud from the Surrealist circle on account
of his involvement in it.
54

For modernists, the most familiar contribution to this discourse is that of Michael
Fried who, in a watershed 1967 Artforum article, claimed, “the success, even the survival,
of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater,” opining that
modern art should not offer durational experience.
55
Over the course of his career, Fried
fleshed out his contention that “theatricality” belongs to artworks that are overly directed
toward the beholder. His theory of theatricality also, however, included Brecht and
Artaud in ways that are productive for the study of art and epic theater.
56
Fried wrote, in
regards to the reconfiguration of the audience’s relationship to theater, “the relevant texts
are, of course, Brecht and Artaud,” and followed up with a footnote: “The need to
achieve a new relation to the spectator which Brecht felt and which he discussed time and
again in his writings on theater was not simply the result of his Marxism. On the contrary,
his discovery of Marx seems to have been in part the discovery of what this relation
might be like, what it might mean,” citing Brecht’s statement that Marx was the only
spectator for his plays.
57
Here, at the height of the United States’ war on communism,
Fried deftly translates Brecht’s socialist theory of an awakened citizenry into a beholder-
oriented theory of the art gallery. Fried’s theory that a painting’s figures’ absorption in a
given activity, and their disregard for the painting’s spectators, offers an illusion of

54
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger, eds., The
Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Games (Lincoln,
NE: The University of Nebraska Press, 2009), xxvii.
55
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5.10 (June 1967): 21.
56
See Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 131-2 and other works in the bibliography.
57
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967): 21 and 23n15.
30
reality, defines the scenario that Brecht sought to reverse with epic theater. There is a
surprising amount of overlap with Brecht in Fried’s pithy footnote, and in Fried’s
attendant notion of “presentness,” which was, in a way, the aim of Brecht’s
defamiliarization devices.
While Fried made important contributions to reformulating Brecht for art
historians and critics, his arguments against theatricality are less pertinent to my project
because they do not engage with the German discourse on theater and were often not
directed at staged or scripted works.
58
As art historian Judith Rodenbeck writes, Fried
“gave barely a nod to the materially theatrical practices of task-structured dance,
happenings, concert-derived performance, multiples, assemblage,” etc.
59
Now that the
Adornian bias against political theater, in general, and Brecht, in particular, has run its
course, and blatantly political or realist art in Germany no longer need arouse anxieties
once associated with Hitler or Stalin, it is productive to revisit the impure forms and non-
specific practices that bias foreclosed, and examine the theater stage as a site of aesthetic
resistance to the Cold War’s divisive rhetoric.
60

58
Philip Auslander offers alternatives to Fried in “Presence and Theatricality in the
discourse of Performance and the Visual Arts,” in From Acting to Performance: Essays
in Modernism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1997): 49-57. Diderot and
Artaud’s impact on postwar art is already the topic of a different study, Lucy Bradnock’s
After Artaud: Art in America, 1949-1965 (Diss. University of Essex, 2010).
59
Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of
Happenings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 6. Rodenbeck also noted, “theatre remains a
dirty word in the art historical literature, a (post-Friedian) term of opprobrium.” See
Rodenbeck, “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality,” Grey Room 12 (Fall 2003): 60.
60
By “realist” art I mean, in a Brechtian sense, art that is socially progressive and
didactic but not necessarily figurative. See Theodor Adorno, “Commitment” [1962], in
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, trans.
Francis McDonagh (New York: Continuum, 2002), 300-18; and Mark Hutchings, “The
Semiotics of Economics in Committed Drama,” in Language and the Subject, ed. Karl
Simms (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, 1997), 189-96.
31
Denigrating remarks on theatricality in the arts lessened with the proliferation of
performance art, installation practices, and auteur cinema in the 1970s and 1980s.
61

Theater and opera houses began archiving and collecting set pieces at the same time as
performance art came into its own, and historical installation art was restaged in museum
galleries resembling theaters, with ushers, spot lights, curtains, and timed entrances.
62

Although the productions discussed throughout this study were not responsible for
absolving theatricality of its negative connotation in the arts, they did manifest a
politicized and often abrasive point of contact between art, actor, and viewer—in other
words, the Brechtian shattering of the fourth wall historically brought visual and
performance artists to theater.
The productions examined in this dissertation were big and expensive, often of
well-known plays. The directors reached out to or appropriated imagery by contemporary
visual artists known to them from major international art exhibitions or magazine
reproductions. These were not the most avant-garde or experimental productions from the
period under consideration, such as those by The Wooster Group in New York, the
Laterna Magika in Prague, and the itinerant Theater Unterwegs (Theater on the Go) in

61
See Steven Sarratore, “Muses for a Postmodern Scenography: Marcel Duchamp and
John Cage,” New England Theatre Journal 4 (1993): 19-38; Adrian Heathfield, ed.,
Small Acts: Performance, the Millenium and the Marking of Time (London: Black Dog,
2000); Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay, eds., The Routledge Reader in Politics and
Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Marvin Carlson, “The
Resistance to Theatricality,” SubStance 31.2/3 (2002): 238-50; Caroline A. Jones,
“Staged Presence: Caroline A. Jones on Performance and Publics,” Artforum (May
2010): 214-19; Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Against Performance Art: Carrie Lambert-Beatty
on the Art of Marina Abromović,” Artforum (May 2010): 208-13; and Amelia Jones,
“‘The Artist is Present’: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” The
Drama Review 55.1 (Spring 2011): 16-45.
62
Claire Bishop treats the 1960s and 1970s re-creation of installations by El Lissitzky,
Moholy-Nagy, and others in, “Reconstruction Era: The Anachronic Time(s) of
Installation Art,” in When Attitudes Become Form (2013), 429.
32
Cologne and Munich. Such productions challenged the very institution of theater,
whereas the case studies I have chosen show how that institution appropriated extra-
theatrical artistic idioms into its fabric. While some of the artists in this study were
already engaged with theatrical exercises, I look specifically at their full cooperation
with, or citation by, the institution of theater, with its ticketing and funding mechanisms,
assigned seating, rehearsal schedules, and close adherence to a script. Artists who had
given up on the gallery as a site for staging politically radical critiques, such as Wolf
Vostell, found a possibility for criticality on the stages of even the biggest “mainstream”
theater houses in West Germany. Looking at theater as an institution in a period when
Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, and others were trying
to overcome theater as a rhetorical device—and the museum-gallery as an institution—
shows how theater production was in fact more ephemeral and dematerialized than these
artists’ performance pieces. The productions designed by Vostell and Spoerri were rooted
in the critique of the gallery and art market but staged in another institution with different
constraints. Theater stages inherently became sites for the art of “institutional critique”
because of their physical and discursive distance from art institutions.
The shift crystallized in the 1960s, from the artistic production of objects to that
of actions and events, was ongoing since at least the 1920s in Germany, and arguably
even earlier. Heartfield and Moholy-Nagy developed image projection technologies and
film montages for Piscator’s Proletarian Theater (a forerunner of Brecht’s epic theater).
Frederick Kiesler designed the stage sets for Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1923) and Eugene
O’Neill’s Emperor Jones (1924) in Berlin, while pioneering new exhibition design
strategies in Germany and the United States, in which viewers could slide objects
33
horizontally and vertically on kinetic framing devices.
63
The development from objects to
space, embodiment, and motion is explicit on the theater stage because of its duration and
inherent relationship to an audience.
Examining how practitioners, including Heartfield, Brecht, and Piscator, survived
World War II and made overlooked and undervalued political art in the 1950s, offers a
corrective not only to the narrative that confines this shift toward spatial, event-based art
to the 1960s, but to its wider implications about the place of Cold War art and politics
within the twentieth century. Timothy Scott Brown correctly states that there was “a
general politicization of the arts in the 1960s in which the boundaries between the art
world, the counterculture, and the political movement became blurred or erased. This
shift in the political potentiality of art was reflected in a turn away from art as a matter of
objects toward art as a matter of action.”
64
Nicolas Bourriaud even identified this shift
from objects to actions as occurring between Pop art and Nouveau Réalisme, themes of
the second and third chapters, respectively.
65
It is facile, however, to localize this “shift”
within postwar practice alone. The productions from the 1960s and 1970s in this study
were collaborations between artists and directors with links to the interwar avant-garde,

63
Kiesler pioneered these exhibition display devices, the “L” and “T” (Leger and Trager)
system, at the 1924 “Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik” (International
Exhibition of New Theater Techniques) in Vienna and developed them further in Peggy
Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, opened in New York in 1942. See Susan
Davison, Philip Rylands, and Dieter Bogner, Peggy Guggenheim and Frederick Kiesler:
The Story of Art of This Century (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004).
64
Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian
Revolt, 1962-1978 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2013), 199; emphasis
original.
65
“Arman, Cesar, and Daniel Spoerri seem fascinated by the act of consumption itself,
relics of which they exhibit… Conversely Andy Warhol, Claes Oldeburg, and James
Rosenquist bring their gaze to bear on the purchase, on the visual impetus that propels an
individual to acquire a product.” Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction [2001] (New York:
Lukas and Sternberg, 2002), 22-23.
34
and therefore show the survival—rather than imitation or institutionalization—of earlier
techniques. These include the merging of live and projected electronic bodies on stage
and Brecht and Piscator’s agenda of making art serve as both aesthetic innovation and
historical education.

Periodizing Epic Theater

The imbricated projects of visual art and stage design in this study are not easily
reconciled with existing narratives of modernism. Montage, Pop art, Happenings,
Nouveau Réalisme, and Fluxus reached German theaters at moments other than the ones
to which art-historical scholarship generally brackets and confines them. Scholars discuss
montage as an artistic mode historically bound to the Weimar period.
66
Institutional
acknowledgment that Pop art was an international phenomenon is a recent discovery,
according to exhibitions such as “International Pop” in Minneapolis (2015) and “The
World Goes Pop” in London (2015), but Wilfried Minks was re-painting works by
Lichtenstein and Wesselmann already in 1966, while Peter Zadek was reproducing
Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, and German theater critics were responding with a
robust discourse on “international Pop” avant la lettre. Vostell used “new media” in
Hamlet that were, by 1979, already fifteen years old. In the literature, Happenings,

66
Sabine T. Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John
Heartfield (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014); Diana M.
Bush, The Dialectical Object: John Heartfield, 1915-1933 (Diss., Columbia University,
2013); Andrés Mario Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography,
Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2012); and David Evans, John Heartfield. Arbeiter-
Illustrierte-Zeitung und Volks-Illustrierte 1930-1938 (New York: Kent Fine Art, 1992).
35
Fluxus, and Nouveau Réalisme seem to have emerged and then dissipated in the sliver of
time from 1958 to 1963—as the manifesto-signatories of those groups fell out of favor
with one another—yet these idioms became topics of theater criticism in the late 1970s.
In the last chapter, the belatedness of productions in abandoned ruins highlights non-
synchronicities in both German history and art history.
These seeming anachronisms turn on the German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s
notion of non-synchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit). Bloch had been at work on his Heritage
of our Times (Erbschaft dieser Zeit; 1935)—from which the term is drawn—since 1924,
in an attempt to historicize the rise of Fascism in Germany and its highly original
conflation of mythological, nationalistic, biological, and economic sources.
67
The non-
contemporaneity Bloch described offers a lens for understanding the artistic idioms in
this study. Heartfield is the most drastic case, as the art-historical literature practically
dispenses with his output in East Berlin, after he returned from exile. Although Bloch
mentioned Heartfield only in passing in his 1935 text, Bloch did devote the last section to
a broad conceptualization of “montage” as a way of writing history and understanding
modernism. From his Zurich exile, Bloch viewed montage as the defining feature of his
historical moment, an observation Fredric Jameson codified decades later, claiming that
the “postmodern” did away with the past, allowing the references Bloch considered non-
synchronous to co-exist in a single moment. Jameson wrote, “modernism must… be seen
as uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development, or to what Ernst
Bloch called the ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous,’ …the coexistence of realities

67
Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Zurich: Verlag Oprecht and Heibling, 1935). See
Anson Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the
Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 5-21.
36
from radically different moments of history—handcrafts alongside the great cartels,
peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance.”
68

The visual anachronisms I examine on theater stages have the potential to change
the terms of a fiercely argued debate within both artistic and theatrical modernism and
alter the way historical periods of prewar and postwar can be thought. Modernists trained
in histories of art or theater will be familiar with the entrenched terms of this schema
from Peter Bürger’s influential Theory of the Avant-Garde, published in 1974.
69
According to this theory, in the first half of the twentieth century, European cultural
producers rebelled against the institutions of art, challenged bourgeois customs, and
sought to integrate art and life in a union that would transcend art for art’s sake. They
were utopianists and revolutionaries. They were the “historical avant-garde.” After World
War II, any attempt to revive these aims was doomed from the outset by the Cold War’s
division between capitalism and communism, the commoditizing forces of globalization,
and the failure of the historical avant-garde to realize its project in the first place. This
postwar situation describes what is referred to as the “neo-avant-garde.” Almost never do
historians of art or theater discuss a single figure as being central to both the historical
and the neo-avant-garde.
70
Decades of detractors have shown how Bürger’s teleology
unravels on the one hand because he identifies a historical origin of the avant-garde that

68
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991), 307, also 309-10.
69
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde [1974], trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Bürger’s precursors include Renato Poggioli, The
Theory of the Avant-Garde [1962], trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Pierre Estivals, L’Avant-garde culturelle
parisienne depuis 1945 (Paris: Guy Leprat, 1962).
70
The shortcomings of “historical avant-garde” as a periodizing device are explored in
Megan Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014).
37
turned out to be elusive, and on the other, because, as Hal Foster put it, his “lapsarian
before and after” forecloses less linear historical paradigms such as repression or
anticipation.
71
Nonetheless, almost all of Bürger’s critics continued to use the terms
“historical” and “neo,” or “prewar” and “postwar,” which has allowed them to exclude
the contributions that artists associated with the “historical” avant-garde made after 1933
or 1945.
Historical, neo-, prewar, and postwar are undeniably useful periodizing
constructs. The fundamental changes European culture underwent after World War II
should not be minimized by wishing away the terms “postwar” and “neo-avant-garde.”
Indeed, in 1949 a theater critic wrote that Brecht’s new production of Mother Courage
and Her Children was the “undisputed theater event since 1945,” referring to the
sensation of culture starting anew at the zero-hour (Stunde Null) of 1945.
72
Yet, with an
understanding of culture as carrying on in complex ways during artists’ exiles, and with a
different body of objects than Bürger was working with, the stage designs in this study
are part of a conception of the avant-garde that has a longer and less linear history. More
than “postwar” or “neo-avant-garde” art and theater, this study recognizes the echo,
translation, and most often, the survival, of avant-garde strategies in the 1950s, 1960s,

71
Hal Foster uses this phrasing and offers psychoanalytic alternatives to Bürger in
“What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” October 70 (Fall 1994): 14; see also
Benjamin Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of
the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37 (Summer 1986): 41-52; Brandon Taylor, Avant-
Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995); Hubert van
den Berg, “On the Historiographic Distinction between Historical and Neo-avant-Garde,”
in Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Amsterdam and New
York: Rodopi, 2005): 63-76.
72
“Die Aufführung war das unbestrittene theatralische Ereignis seit 1945.” The article,
“Bedeutendes Theaterereignis,” Abendpost (13 Jan 1949), in ADK Bertolt Brecht Archiv,
Theaterdokumentation, (Press) Folder 655.
38
and 1970s. Indebted to Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin’s penetrating examinations of
historiography, this study considers German cultural production as enmeshed in a history
of spurts, interruptions, retrospect, and survival.
73

If the esthetic connections among practitioners in my case studies transcend the
“historical” versus “neo” divide in modern art, it would seem that certain conditions
would have to have been present in the 1920s for artists such as Heartfield, Grosz, and
Brecht, that were again relevant for Heartfield in the 1950s and Nouveau Réaliste, neo-
Dada, and Fluxus artists in the 1960s. Brecht’s repurposing of classical scripts and
Heartfield’s re-use of scraps of newsprint in the Weimar period were premised on
disillusionment with bourgeois culture and the preciousness of the art object. The
socialist impulse behind such projects may have gone underground or it may have gone
into exile during the Nazi reign, but this study seeks to show that this impulse survived
into the period of divided Germany and that its necessity was made all the more urgent by
the partitioning of a capitalist West and a socialist East.
74

73
The passages that inform this specifically German conception of history as non-
synchronous can be found in: Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” [1921] in
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 255; Georges Didi-
Huberman, “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time,”
trans. Vivian Rehberg and Boris Belay, Common Knowledge 9.2 (2003): 273; Giorgio
Agamben, “Nymphs,” in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed.
Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, trans. Amanda Minervini (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011), 66; and Marek Tamm, “Introduction,” in Afterlife of Events:
Perspectives on Mnemohistory, ed. Marek Tamm (Hampshire, UK and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 9.
74
Brecht’s fifteen years in exile brought him to Prague, Vienna, Zurich, the Finnish
island Fyn, and Santa Monica, California. Heartfield’s exile period was spent in Prague
from 1933-1938 and then London until 1950. This period is not examined in this study
because theater was not a major medium of artistic output in their respective exiles.
39
Even Bürger’s detractors have not sufficiently questioned the Cold War
foundations of the depoliticization of postwar European visual forms underlying the
terms “post,” and “neo.”
75
Artists in the four chapters approached subjects ranging from
race riots and capital punishment, to the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, sexual
liberation, abortion, women’s liberation, and the ecological movement. Because of the
way the cultural Cold War was waged in the West, however, some of the most vocal art
critics in the 1960s and 1970s, who will be quoted throughout, downplayed these politics,
especially when they seemed anti-capitalist or sympathetic with the Rote Armee Faktion
(RAF).
76
Postwar German theater stages defamiliarized, and accentuated the politics of
these visual artistic modes in a way that gallery settings only naturalized. In the gallery,
art critics could discuss Pop art, in depoliticized terms, as a formal strategy—of course
there are exceptions, such as Warhol’s Death and Disaster series—but when it became
the backdrop for a bourgeois melodrama about stealing from the rich to give to the poor,
theater critics saw Pop art as emblematic of the New Left’s failure to combat economic
inequality in the postwar world. By the time of Vostell’s 1979 Hamlet, the use of
television monitors, cameras, and closed-circuit video had become commonplace in
galleries through multimedia installations by Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Joan

75
This reading builds on those of Eva Cockcroft, Jane de Hart Matthews, and David and
Cecile Shapiro in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (London
and New York: Routledge, 1985/2000), 147-96 and Frances Stoner Saunders, The
Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York and London:
The New Press, 1999/2013), 213-34.
76
This was the group in the 1970s that took violent action against West German
politicians and business leaders with Nazi pasts, suggesting in their writings that
capitalism in West Germany was a continuation of fascism. Many of the directors,
photojournalists, and visual artists in this study took a stand for or against their actions,
causing heated debate among critics and audiences. For an excellent discussion of these
debates, see Sabrina Müller, ed., RAF: Terror im Südwesten (Aalen: Wahl-Druck GmbH
and Stuttgart: Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg: 2013).
40
Jonas, but when Vostell used those technologies to narrate Shakespeare’s play about the
downfall of the royal house of Denmark through spying and intrigue, theater critics
understood video art as a reflection of state surveillance and the specter of Stasi
informants. In some cases, the political readings of these artistic idioms that theater
critics undertook went above and beyond any critique the artists themselves were
mounting. Nevertheless, this line of interpretation overturns the bias that Dada artists
Raoul Hausmann and Hans Richter introduced and Bürger perpetuated, according to
which postwar artists involved with Pop, Fluxus, and Nouveau Réalisme lacked the
radical politics and formal inventiveness of interwar Dada.
77
My recuperation of art and
epic theater highlights the oppositional politics of such postwar artistic idioms.
This study identifies polarities such as historical/neo, East/West, and
capitalist/communist, and examines theater productions that made use of contemporary
art to resist and, in most cases, move past these oppositions. The problems with the
East/West tension were particularly acute for artists and directors in West Germany in the
1960s and 1970s who had been trained in East Germany, some under Brecht himself.
While staying well within most definitions of the “West” this study’s interrogation of
Cold War Germany’s border crossings takes a step in the direction of addressing what
Rossella Ferrari, in her study of contemporary Chinese theater, describes as, “the
prevalent Euro-American centrism of canonical avant-garde theories which have at times
been marred by inaccurate and fairly hegemonic assumptions about largely

77
Hubert van den Berg, “On the Historiographic Distinction between Historical and Neo-
avant-Garde,” in Scheunemann, Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde (2005): 63-76.
41
unidirectional, if not utterly derivative, patterns of dissemination.”
78
Brecht was the first
to acknowledge that his notion of epic theater comes from Chinese acting, specifically a
performance he attended by the Peking Opera star Mei Lan Fan in 1935.
79
This study
focuses on the impact of Brechtian aesthetics on West German theater stages and artistic
practice despite the Cold War’s rhetoric of the capitalist West versus the communist East.
After 1961 the tightly controlled Berlin wall made the spread of a committed Marxist’s
theories seem improbable within West Germany. Central elements of epic theater that
debunk this improbability, which recur throughout the four chapters, are: the obfuscation
of traditional markers of authorship, the appropriation of images, the collectivization of
theatrical production, the cognitive and physical activation of the audience through
electronically produced images, and the mutually inflecting role of text and image within
a montage aesthetic that recontextualized contemporary politics.

78
Rossella Ferrari, Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary
China (London, New York, and Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2011), 5. See also James M.
Harding and John Rouse, “Introduction,” Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational
Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 2006).
79
Bertolt Brecht, “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting” [1936], in Brecht on Theater,
3
rd
Edition, Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, eds. (New York and London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 151-9. First published in English in 1936 and in
German in 1949 as “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst.”
42
Images to the Introduction

FIG 1. Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin, Armide at the Palais-Royal, 1761

FIG 2. Roman Weyl, scenic sketch for The Outsiders, Berlin, 1946
43
Chapter 1
Restaging the Avant-Garde in East Berlin

In the 1920s, Bertolt Brecht made a wish for the mobilization of electronic media
on stage in the service of an intellectually engaged audience. The belated fulfillment of
that wish came in bits and pieces throughout the twentieth century. John Rouse, a
historian of German theater, observed that, “during the decade between 1950 and 1960,
nearly all the stylistic elements of Brecht’s theater were adopted, in however modified a
form, into the theatrical vocabulary of the mainstream West German theater.”
80
Brecht
has also maintained a presence in art-historical discussions of montage and appropriation
ever since Walter Benjamin applauded his socially engaged theater in the 1930s and set
his plays in dialogue with the politics and formal strategies of Berlin Dada.
81
While
scholars have examined Brecht’s dramaturgical theory and, to a lesser extent, his impact
on visual artists, this chapter shows that his theory itself was based in explicitly visual

80
John Rouse, Brecht and the West German Theater: The Practice and Politics of
Interpretation, (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1989) 83.
81
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” [1934], trans. Edmund Jephcott in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith,
Vol. 2/2 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 768-82; and
“What is the Epic Theater?” [1939], trans. Harry Zohn in Vol. 4 of the above, 302-9.
Scholarship that acknowledges the connection between Brecht, montage, and
appropriation art includes Benjamin Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation
and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum (Sept 1982): 43-44; Hal Foster,
Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 86 and The Return of the Real: The
Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 171; Maud Lavin,
Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 9; Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful
Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contestation of Postwar
France, 1945-1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 9, 37; and Matthew S. Witkovsky,
“Middle-Class Montage,” in New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar
Republic 1919-1933, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (Munich: Prestel and
Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015), 105-14.
44
ideas about what a stage should look like and how the fine arts contribute to society. John
Heartfield, the German stage designer and graphic artist, was the nodal figure between
dramaturgical and visual spheres of production in interwar Berlin.
82

Heartfield was a master technician with access to government archives of
historical film footage and a refined hand at splicing, editing, projecting, and
superimposing still and moving images.
83
Although Brecht did not collaborate with
Heartfield until after the Second World War, they were well aware of each other’s work.
As the composer Hanns Eisler remarked, “Brecht was infatuated with John Heartfield. He
totally admired this wonderful man.”
84
Brecht scholar John Willett writes that Brecht was
“greatly impressed” by “Heartfield’s development of a new artistic genre in the shape of
political photomontage,” and even considered it a visual equivalent of epic theater.
85

Through the re-use and re-contextualization of found imagery, Heartfield revealed the
fallacy of the photograph’s representational claims to truth-value and used propaganda to
undermine its own coded methods. As Sabine Kriebel writes, Heartfield’s interwar
photomontage practice, “critically questions ciphers of authority and authenticity—the

82
Born Helmut Herzfeld, he polemicaly anglicized his name amid fierce anti-British
propaganda in Germany during World War I. His brother and collaborator, Wieland,
added an E to his surname, to become Herzfelde.
83
Heartfield was granted access to the German government’s film archives in 1917 when
the Foreign Office hired him to produce pro-war propaganda films. See Peter Jelavich,
“German Culture in the Great War,” in European Culture in the Great War: The Arts,
Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914-1918, ed. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 55-56. Before teaming up with Erwin
Piscator in fall 1920, he worked as a scenic designer in Berlin for the Schall und Rauch
cabaret, the Reinhardt Theater, and the Deutsches Theater.
84
Eisler in Brecht, Music, and Culture: Hanns Eisler in Conversation with Hans Bunge,
ed. and trans. Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements (London: Bloomsbury Methuen
Drama, 2014), 97.
85
John Willett, Brecht in Context (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama,
1998), 150.
45
photograph, the newspaper clipping, journalistic headlines, quotations, indexical
markings—not only by challenging discourses of truth, authenticity, and power but also
by suggesting an alternative, Communist representation of reality.”
86
Brecht, meanwhile,
was complicating heroic narratives of then-familiar stories related to war and revolution
through visual and aural defamiliarization effects.
87

The first task of this chapter is to highlight the contributions of visual artists to a
Brechtian mode that can be defined by the appropriation of found text and imagery, the
use of electronic imaging devices, the audience’s cerebral or physical activity, and the
exposure of the underlying illusionism of artistic production through unexpected pauses,
gestures, and visual cues. The second task of this discussion is to acknowledge the
transhistorical development of this mode of art making and theater production across the
interwar and postwar periods. While the immense literature on Brecht and his key
collaborators concentrates on the interwar and exile periods, their publications and
international tours in post-World War II Europe, and particularly their activities in East
Berlin, had important repercussions for theater and visual arts in the 1960s and 1970s.
Finally, this chapter shows how a Brechtian aesthetic tradition fundamentally
obscures the notion of discrete authors, through collective production and the
unauthorized borrowing of source material. This mode of working originated in 1920

86
Sabine Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2014), 98.
87
Brecht used the term, Verfremdungseffekte, in its plural form and identified it in
sources as various as Kabuki theater, the gestures of Peking Opera star Mei Lan Fan,
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s genre paintings, and the Russian Formalist concept of
ostranenie (making strange). These distinctions in terminology and translation are
rehearsed in Brecht studies such as Martina Kolb, “Bertolt Brecht—Homme du Monde:
Exile, Verfremdung, and Weltliteratur,” in German Literature as World Literature, ed.
Thomas Oliver Beebee (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 107-09.
46
with the Proletarian Theater (Proletarisches Theater) of the German avant-garde director
Erwin Piscator and Heartfield. By the time Brecht worked under Piscator in Berlin in
1926 and began to develop a theory of the epic theater, Piscator had been working closely
with Heartfield already for six years. Brecht’s notion of “epic theater” became better
known because Brecht was the more articulate and prolific writer, but it was developed in
dialogue with Piscator and Heartfield. Piscator’s manner of staging, in turn, was informed
by his work with artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Sasha Stone, George Grosz, and,
most significantly, Heartfield.
88
In delineating “Brechtian” theater and its use for artists in
the postwar period, this chapter begins in the 1920s with the foundational collaborations
between Piscator and Heartfield.

Berlin Dada and The Proletarian Theater, 1920-1929

In the summer of 1920, shortly before Heartfield began working for Piscator at
the Proletarian Theater, he and George Grosz organized the International Dada Fair, a
group exhibition in Berlin.
89
One of the many objects they presented in the meticulously
cluttered gallery of Dr. Otto Burchard was a poster that read, “Art is Dead, Long Live the

88
This chapter includes a brief discussion of Piscator’s collaborations with George Grosz
(Georg Ehrenfried Groβ) but does not tend to Sasha Stone’s (Aleksander Serge
Steinsapir) projections for Piscator’s 1927 production, Hoppla, Such is Life! (Hoppla!
Wir leben). See Eckhardt Köhn, Sasha Stone, Fotografien 1925-1939 (Berlin: Nishen,
1990), 13; Michael Schwaiger, Bertolt Brecht und Erwin Piscator: experimentelles
Theater im Berlin der Zwanzigerjahre (Munich: Brandstätter Verlag and Vienna:
Österreichisches Theatermuseum, 2004), 41; and Rainer Metzger, Berlin: The Twenties
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2007), 117.
89
For further discussion of Dada artists in Berlin, see Dorothée Brill, Shock and the
Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press and University
Press of New England, 2010), 66.
47
New Machine Art of Tatlin” (Die Kunst ist tot, Es lebe die neue Maschinenkunst Tatlins;
fig. 1).
90
Considering the role mechanical reproduction would have in the dissemination
of art over the coming decades, their proposition of moving past easel painting was
prescient. Much more disconcerting, even in hindsight, is the figure lurking behind them,
The Middle Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture
(Der wildgewordene Spieβer Heartfield. Elektro-mechanische Tatlin-Plastik, 1920; fig.
2).
This mannequin of sockets, clamps, and weaponry anticipated subsequent
experiments in intermediality that were both progressive and nefarious. Its chest bore the
causes and effects of the Great War, for which both artists were drafted, a war that
mobilized new technologies for the most inhumane ends and left so many limbless,
jobless, and homeless. The artists affixed a handgun, cutlery, military medals, and an Iron
Cross to the dummy’s chest. They installed an electric bell on its shoulder and, in place of
a head, screwed into its neck a functioning light bulb whose wire snaked out from the
figure’s amputated leg into a wall socket. The vital functions of this surrogate figure were
rendered dependent on electricity or—to use a German term applied to a wide variety of
mechanical contraptions—the Apparat (apparatus).
91
The tropes in this assemblage that

90
The political implications of this exhibition are examined in Shearer West, Artists in
Germany, 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000), 119; Debbie Lewer, “Revolution and the Weimar Avant-Garde: Contesting the
Politics of Art, 1919-1924,” in Weimar Culture Revisited, ed. John Williams (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 15; and Jed Rasula, Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and
the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 219. Rasula
suggests that Heartfield and Grosz overestimated Tatlin’s glorification of the machine,
although their appreciation for his proletarian and anti-art positions was well-founded.
91
The Berlinishe Galerie in Berlin own the 1988 reproduction of the sculpture and lists
the following materials: tailor's dummy, revolver, doorbell, knife, fork, letter “C” and
48
would become important for epic theater are: defamiliarization and rupture, liveness and
electronic mediation, and the dissonant juxtaposition of images. As with postwar stage
designs that would credit Brecht with the concept of visible lighting sources, this
sculpture accentuated the fixture and wires one might customarily conceal from view.
The role of electronic technologies and the assault on the autonomy of the work of art,
common to both montage and epic theater, were mapped out in this proposal for a body.
The poetics of a light bulb in place of a head, a symbol perhaps for misguided
“enlightenment,” offers a penetrating reflection on electricity’s power over humans.
Matthew Biro discusses the sculpture as an attempt “to remember and communicate
personal wartime experiences” and “to engage with the German visual culture that
disseminated the image of war.”
92
In Brigid Doherty’s discussion of this sculpture she
explains that electric shock therapy was an attempted remedy for soldiers’ post-traumatic
neuroses.
93
Doherty writes, “I see him forever enduring a shocking cure, with the glow of
his head as a sign of his reaction to the activity of an apparatus for the representation of
shock, an apparatus that is now part of his own traumatized body.”
94
In this early-1920s
moment, theorists wrote about electronic media as tools for allowing democratic access
to information and entertainment, but also for the leveling of human subjectivity.
95
The

number “27” signs, plaster dentures, embroidered insignia of the Black Eagle Order on
horse blanket, Osram light bulb, Iron Cross, stand, and other objects.
92
Matthew Biro The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 181.
93
Brigid Doherty, “‘See: We are All Neurasthenics!’ or, the Trauma of Dada Collage,”
Critical Inquiry 24.1 (Fall 1997): 82-132.
94
Ibid., 123.
95
See Frederic J. Schwartz, “Form Follows Fetish: Adolf Behne and the Problem of
Sachlichkeit,” Oxford Art Journal 21.2 (1998): 47-77. Matthew Biro writes about the
figure of the cyborg in this period in “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in
49
Marxist reading that machines were overtaking roles previously filled by humans, and in
so doing were threatening human relations as such, was intensified by the Weimer era’s
profusion of seeing and recording devices, street lighting, illuminated advertisements,
and film.
96
These commercial and artistic electrifications of daily life did not obliterate
humanization but did significantly transform it. Emerging from wartime experiences,
Heartfield and Grosz were sensitive to the threat of mechanization. Rather than condemn
it outright, their sculpture critically weighed its destructive effects alongside its utopian
potential.
The internalization of trauma and electronic response in Heartfield’s juxtaposition
of live and projected bodies onto theater stages was both frightening and enticing. In the
post-traumatic context of early 1920s Berlin, electronic apparatuses were politically
charged objects on theater stages, particularly when they appeared to interact with live
actors, as if human and machine could communicate on the same level. Over the course
of the 1920s, Heartfield and Grosz would design theater stage sets using films,
projections, and conveyor belts. Although these technologies threatened some audiences
and critics, they also transported glimmering scenes of historical proletarian revolution
into the present and transformed the “representation of shock” into a setting for anti-
bourgeois, antiwar theater.
Brecht and Piscator both commissioned Heartfield to design didactic imagery for
proletarian audiences—Piscator in the 1920s and Brecht in the 1950s. Projections, film,

Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique 62 (Spring-Summer 1994): 71-110 and
The Dada Cyborg (2009).
96
Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 2-10; and Susan Buck-Morss, The
Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1991), 365.
50
rotating stages, and innovative lighting would enhance the production’s historical and
political dimensions, they argued, and these means would help the audience recognize its
position within history.
97
The directors admired Heartfield’s expertise in the incipient
field of electronic art as well as his antiwar, antibourgeois position.

His photo- and film-
montages, graphic art, and sculpture made visible the processes of their production. His
cutting, pasting, splicing, and electrification—in short, his labor—was never concealed
below the surface. This exposure, both visually and ideologically, to the means of
production, was the centerpiece of the theory of epic theater that Brecht would refine in
the late 1920s and 1930s. As Brecht revealed lighting sources and other backstage
apparatuses, and Piscator did away with the backstage area altogether in his revolving
stage, Heartfield and Grosz’s inclusion of a wire and power outlet as formal elements in
their 1920 sculpture anticipated these devices.
In addition to setting the stage for intermedial and electronic experiments, the
atrocities of the First World War also led to the conditions under which Heartfield and
Piscator were acquainted. After two years in the trenches Piscator moved to a staff post
and then began volunteering for a front-line theater.
98
The director, Eduard Büsing,
introduced Piscator to Heartfield’s brother, Wieland Herzfelde, was involved in the
soldier’s theater. Although Piscator spoke of the soldier’s theater as a degradation of art,

97
See Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Baz
Kershaw, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London and
New York: Routledge, 1999); and Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory,
Practice, Ideology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
98
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre, trans. Hugh Rorrison (New York: Avon Books,
1978), 14. Originally published in German as Das Proletarische Theater (Berlin:
Adalbert Schutz Verlag, 1929). Reprinted in 1963 in German by Rowohlt Verlag,
Reinbeck bei Hamburg, and in English by Methuen in London. Subsequent quotes are
from the Rorrison translation. Emphasis original.
51
as “vulgar trash in the face of life and death,” it was the experience that incited his move
to proletarian theater.
99
After fighting in the trenches Piscator did not feel that he could
return to the bourgeois, court system of theater. Instead, he felt morally obligated to use
his knowledge of the institution to unseat the class of politicians that plunged Germany
into the war.
Herzfelde, meanwhile, founded the Malik-Verlag in 1917, a publisher of socialist
journals, print portfolios, and books.
100
Along with these publications, Heartfield and
Grosz’s political caricatures and graphic works were widely circulated between 1930 and
1938 in The Workers’ Illustrated Press (AIZ). After returning from the war, Piscator
contacted Herzfelde, who introduced him to Berlin Dada artists including his brother,
George Grosz, Richard Hulsenbeck, and Raoul Hausmann.
101
Participating in their
performances was a heady experience for Piscator. He recalled attacking “the art-loving
‘Kurfürstendamm public’ with recitations of simultaneous poems of the most

99
Ibid., 5-20.
100
Malik-Verlag’s first major project was reviving the previously censored paper, New
Youth (Neue Jugend), edited by Herzfelde with contributions from Heartfield, Grosz, and
Rudolf Schlichter, and support from Walter Benjamin. Herzfelde edited and printed one
issue of the satirical Dada magazine Every Man His Own Football (Jedermann sein
eigener Fussball) in 1919 before the police seized it. Grosz and Heartfield were involved
with Bankruptcy (Die Pleite; 1919-1924), The Opposer (Der Gegner; 1919-1922), and
Der Dada (1919-1920). Heartfield edited the satirical magazine, The Cudgel (Der
Knüppel), published by an affiliate of the KPD, starting in 1923. For further details, see
Jean O’Donovan, “George Grosz’s Guide to a Dissolute Berlin,” in The European Avant-
Garde: Text and Image, ed. Selena Daly and Monica Insinga (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 117-21; Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg (2009),
32-44; Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 24f14; L. Guttsman, Art for the Workers:
Ideology and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997), 103-05; and Sabine T. Kriebel, “Radical Left Magazines in Berlin,” in The
Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Europe 1880-1940, ed.
Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 847-51.
101
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 20.
52
incomprehensible sort, using toy revolvers, toilet paper, false beards and poems by
Goethe and Rudolf Presber… We came to the conclusion that if art were to have a
meaning at all it must be a weapon in the class struggle.”
102
This description encapsulates
the contours of what would become Director’s Theater: the deconstruction and rewriting
of the classics, the assaultive role of the visual, the interrogation of recent German
history, and the antagonism toward bourgeois audiences.
In 1929, four years before Hitler’s rise to power, Piscator wrote his major text,
The Political Theater (Das Politische Theater), in an attempt to clarify the role theater
might be able to play in instigating resistance to fascism. Reflecting back on his first
collaboration with Heartfield in 1920, he wrote:
The sets were primitive, as one might imagine. But in view of the new tasks
facing the theater, these simple, hastily painted canvases underwent a change in
significance… This was no longer purely ‘décor,’ but also sketched in the social,
politico-geographical and economic implications. It had a part to play. It obtruded
into events on the stage and came to be an active dramatic element. And at this
point, the performance began to work on a new level, a pedagogical level.
103

Although Piscator’s aesthetic became increasingly opulent throughout the 1920s and
1930s, it is worth noting that in this foundational collaboration, Heartfield’s stage set was
not a mere visual apparatus. It guided the audience’s exposure to historical episodes of
revolution and class struggle and was chiefly responsible for transforming an experience
of entertainment into one of education. For Piscator, the historic intervention in theatrical
production was that the scenic design now functioned on the level of a script.
Heartfield’s first set designs for Piscator’s Proleterian Theater in 1920 reflected
the company’s modest budget and the demands of shuffling between theaters and public

102
Ibid., 21-22.
103
Ibid., 49.
53
halls in working class neighborhoods of Berlin, where tickets were offered free or at
reduced prices.
104
Heartfield had to set up scrims and props swiftly, often transporting
them in a handcart. Throughout the 1920s electronic technologies, such as back-projected
screens and the juxtaposition of historical film footage with live actors, were vehicles in
the Proletarian Theater’s mission of the political education of the working class. The set
design referred to in the above quote, however, was a simple map with a bright red sun to
the East, leading toward Russia (fig. 3). Heartfield painted it for Russia’s Day (Russlands
Tag), a one-act sketch by the Hungarian émigré Lajos Barta.
105
Piscator presented it on a
triple bill inaugurating the Proletarian Theater in Berlin on October 14, 1920, the third
anniversary of Russia’s October Revolution.
In Piscator’s words, the stage production of Russia’s Day aimed at
“enlightenment, knowledge and clarity.”
106
The personification of World Capital was
dressed in a giant moneybag with a stockbroker’s top hat, shouting, “trample the masses
underfoot!” and “anybody who is not with me is against me. I will smash my
enemies.”
107
World Capital barked orders and politicians obediently submitted. Piscator
later looked back on such productions as naively heavy-handed, but in the immediate
wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, he felt an obligation to use theater to
inform working-class audiences of the historical forces subduing them.
108
Even if

104
Ibid., 38.
105
Andrés Mario Zervigón offers a pithy discussion of Russia’s Day in John Heartfield
and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde
Photomontage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 191.
106
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 49.
107
Ibid., 38.
108
“This is crude, propagandistic caricature,” Piscator reflected on Russia’s Day in The
Political Theatre (1978), 39.
54
rudimentary, the visual backdrop was essential to Piscator’s stage, which relied on legible
and informative imagery.
The works performed alongside Russia’s Day were Andor Gábor’s At the Gate
(Vor dem Tore) and Karl August Wittfogel’s The Cripple (Der Krüppel).
109
These classic
examples of agitprop (agitational propaganda) were not intended to illustrate capitalist
oppression within a cohesive narrative, as Brecht’s plays would in coming years, but
rather to incite action through provocative historical episodes not necessarily unified into
a seamless whole. The printed program for the evening stated the Proletarian Theater’s
mission with urgency: “The day of decision is upon us. Either active solidarity with
Soviet Russia in the course of the coming months – or international Capital will succeed
in annihilating the custodians of world revolution. Either socialism, or decline into
barbarism.”
110

The premise of The Cripple is that the limbless World War I veterans begging on
the streets of Berlin were a direct result of capitalist exploitation (fig. 4). Heartfield
agreed to paint a street scene for the production but fell behind schedule and Piscator,
after stalling half an hour, began the production without the backdrop.
111
Decades later,
Piscator recounted the story:
Heartfield: “Stop, Erwin, stop! I’m here!” All heads turned in astonishment
toward the little man with the red face who had just burst in. We could not simply
go on, so I stood up, abandoned my role as the cripple for the moment, and called

109
Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and
Austria, 1919-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 56.
110
Reprinted in Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to
Grotowski (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1982/2013), 145.
111
In addition to the premier of this production on October 14, 1920, the triple bill played
in various venues. Piscator’s above description of The Cripple was likely not the premier,
as the anecdote does not appear in other accounts of that night. See John Willett, The
Theatre of the Weimar Republic (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1988), 261.
55
down to him: “Where have you been all this time? We waited almost half an hour
for you [murmur of agreement from the audience] and then we had to start
without your backdrop.” Heartfield: “You didn’t send the car! It’s your fault! I ran
through the streets, the streetcars wouldn’t take me because the cloth was too big.
When I finally managed to board one I had to stand on the platform at the back,
and I almost fell off!” [Increasing amusement in the audience.] – I interrupted
him: “Calm down, Johnny, we have to get on with the show.” Heartfield [highly
excited]: No, the cloth must be put up first!” And since he refused to calm down I
turned to the audience and asked them what was to be done, should we continue
to play, or should we hang up the backdrop? There was an overwhelming majority
for the backdrop. So we dropped the curtain, hung up the backdrop and to
everybody’s satisfaction started the play anew.
112

Piscator’s inclusion of the audience in a discussion most directors would only entertain
offstage indicated the direction epic theater would take. The appeal to the audience to
make decisions with immediate and tangible outcomes returned as a major factor after
World War II in theater, street performance, Happenings, and art galleries. Already in
1920, however, the conversation between scenic designer and director-actor offers a
textbook example of epic theater: breaking from the script, embracing spontaneity,
prioritizing the visual, and summoning the audience’s vocal and cognitive activity.
Brecht would spend much of his career de-schooling actors to create precisely the effect
that Piscator described when he said, “I stood up, abandoned my role as the cripple.”
Heartfield also offered the audience a chance to come face to face with the means
of production, the artist himself. Rather than “artist,” however, Heartfield preferred the
title “monteur,” from the verb montieren, “to assemble.”
113
The German terms used to
describe scenic artists—Ausstatter (furnisher) and Bühnenbildner (stage builder)—
likewise make explicit reference to the type of work involved in the act of making. The
emphasis on labor rather than art was to become a central tenet of Piscator and Brecht’s

112
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 39-40.
113
Montieren is given as “to arrange” in Arthur Danto, The Madonna of the Future:
Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000), 5.
56
respective conceptions of epic theater. Piscator looked back on Heartfield’s frantic
interruption of The Cripple and joked, “Nowadays I refer to John Heartfield as the
founder of the epic theater.”
114

Piscator’s first production to combine historical film footage with live actors on
stage, so that they appeared to be interacting with one another, was In Spite of
Everything! (Trotz Alledem!), a KPD commission for the annual party convention in
1925. Although Piscator never credited Heartfield for this production, Heartfield was
present during the installation of the stage and it is likely he had a hand in configuring the
projectors and machinery.
115
In Spite of Everything! was a chronicle of communist
developments in German history, from the declaration of World War I to 1919. Piscator
used the Grosses Schauspielhaus in the center of Berlin, which the director Max
Reinhardt had recently converted from a circus into a massive theater.
116
Critics from
periodicals of all political allegiances proclaimed the production to be the height of
Piscator’s achievement in the use of electronic media and the motivation of mass
audiences.
117
A later montage assembled by Piscator’s co-producer, Felix Gasbara, shows
photographs, film stills, and the assembled audience (fig. 5). The enormous head is that
of the assassinated protagonist of the play, Karl Liebknecht. The projection of Liebknecht
was transmitted to the stage, photographed, and then scaled and cut to appear in this
composition as if it filled the entire house. This montage attempts to capture the

114
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 40.
115
Ibid., 96. Zervigón speculates about Heartfield’s involvement in this production in
Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image (2012), 263f57.
116
Reinhardt’s 1919 renovation resulted in a spectator area of 3,000 seats. Piscator
claimed the crowd far outnumbered that total, and audience members packed into aisles
throughout. Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 94f3.
117
Several reviews of the production are reprinted in ibid., 90.
57
audience’s experience of the stage by arranging a selection of the projected source
images with photographs of the theater house. This montage and other composite post-
production materials are part of the production’s historical record, often standing in for
photographs of the chaotic event itself.
The scenic design consisted of historical photographs and newsreel clippings
projected onto a rotating stage composed of ramps, niches, and a terraced platform. The
revolving mechanism was designed to show all sides of the set, back and front, rather
than concealing scene changes from view. Piscator obtained documentary footage from
government archives, including shots of flamethrowers, mutilated bodies, political
parades, demobilization, and newsreel footage of the German revolution.
118
Confirming
the centrality of the visual within his production, Piscator claimed that these images had a
“more striking impact on the masses of the proletariat than a hundred lectures.”
119
In
appropriating pre-existing war footage for avant-garde means, Piscator turned the
emotional appeal of propaganda into the intellectual and ethically challenging experience
of agitprop, concluding that “the drastic effect of using film clips showed beyond any
theoretical consideration that they were not only right for presenting political and social
mechanisms, that is, from the point of view of content, but also in a higher sense, right
from the formal point of view.”
120
Film and theater resonated for Piscator because they
were channels for bringing together different media so that previously generated images
and sounds could be put to new ends. Piscator claimed, “what emerged was that the most

118
Piscator mentions a “contact” as the source for these images, perhaps referring to
Heartfield, who had access to such materials through his work for the foreign office.
Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 94; and Zervigón, John Heartfield and the
Agitated Image (2012), 263f57.
119
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 94.
120
Ibid., 97.
58
effective political propaganda lay along the same lines as the highest artistic form.”
121

The correspondence between the politics and aesthetics of epic theater would remain a
centerpiece of Brecht’s dramaturgy, and that of his students as well.
Piscator’s electronic media design obscured the boundaries between acting, re-
enacting, and presenting evidentiary footage. This juxtaposition of live actors and
documentary film brought recent history into the present. It showed how found footage
can be framed in a way that subverts its original producer’s purposes and how such
techniques can make the stage a site of illusionistic and flickering representations that are
nevertheless non-fictional. Piscator remarked: “The people who filled the house had for
the most part been actively involved in the period, and what we were showing them was
in a true sense their own fate, their own tragedy being acted out before their eyes.”
122
One
critic mentioned cries of anguish and self-accusation when the audience saw Liebknecht
being arrested and, in other scenes, laughing, shouting, stomping, and fist waving.
123

Piscator’s references to the political formats of “massive demonstration” and “effective
agitation” are apt given that his production triggered the same gestures one saw at
contemporary political demonstrations.
124

For Piscator, the combination of moving electronic images and live bodies on
stage presented audiences with a choice. They could be active or reactive, trapped by the
apparatus or revolutionaries against its domination. In the 1920s, this juxtaposition of live
and electronically mediated bodies on stage was an all-out revolution in stage design.
Film had been used on stage in several productions prior to Piscator’s In Spite of

121
Ibid.
122
Ibid., 96-97.
123
Frankfurter Zeitung (1 Apr 1929) (“How it Began”) reprinted in ibid., 97.
124
Ibid., 96-97.
59
Everything! but it served to distract audiences during scene changes.
125
Entr’act, the short
film by René Clair with cameos by Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Erik
Satie, also fulfilled this interlude function during Satie’s 1924 ballet, Relâche.
126
By
contrast, Piscator was excited about integrating the medium of film into the staged event
as a part of the plot, showing that actors on stage are historical subjects who have a
responsibility to be active when faced with past images of class struggle.
In his 1926 production, Tidal Wave (Sturmflut), Piscator began using multiple
projectors and custom-made in addition to found footage (fig. 6-7). Increasingly, he
realized that film projections could offer visual contradictions of what the characters
appeared to be thinking or saying and thus caused audience members to perceive the co-
existence of a narrative and a surreptitious counter-narrative. For Piscator’s first
collaboration with George Grosz, The Drunken Ship (Das trunkene Schiff), at the Berlin
Volksbühne in 1926, Grosz devised a tripartite screen with back-projected images that
maintained his characteristically hand-drawn, cartoonish style. In 1927 Grosz designed an
elaborate stage for Piscator’s production of The Good Soldier Schwejk (Die Abenteuer
des braven Soldaten Schwejk), using conveyor belts that transported figures and props on
and off stage.
127
Heartfield assisted with an animated film that was projected behind the
actors, allowing them to interface with the cartoon figures.
128

125
Michael Patterson identifies use of film in productions of Around the Alster (Rund um
den Alster; 1922), The Immortal (Der Unsterbliche; 1920), and Methusalem (1920) The
Revolution in German Theatre 1900-1933 (Boston, London, and Henley: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1981), 125.
126
Steven Higgins, Still Moving: The Film and Media Collections of the Museum of
Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 104.
127
The most thorough study of this production remains Andrew Walter, The Theatrical
Designs of George Grosz (Diss. Yale University, 1972).
128
Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image (2012), 114-15.
60
In 1929, the Bauhaus master Moholy-Nagy designed costumes, lighting, and a
stage set with projected images and film clips for Piscator’s production of The Merchant
of Berlin (Der Kaufmann von Berlin; fig. 8). Piscator emphasized the proletarian sections
of the play with a chorus of workers singing musical pieces by Hanns Eisler. Soldiers or
factory workers breaking out into song is, of course, the least natural thing, and would
become an important defamiliarization device in Brecht’s epic theater. Moholy-Nagy
constructed three tiers onto the stage, representative of economic classes, connected by
bridges and conveyor belts.
129
A collage of stills from the production shows how the
shadows of the figures on stage danced with the projected images, setting up
juxtapositions between liveness and simulacra. Moholy-Nagy placed a transparent scrim
at the front edge of the stage onto which he projected films, literalizing the “fourth wall”
between actors and spectators, only to dematerialize it through elaborate and overlapping
projections.
The Merchant of Berlin’s Jewish author, Walter Mehring, portrayed the period of
inflation in Berlin as an economic situation that exasperated racial and religious tensions
for émigrés from Eastern Europe. Many critics understood it instead as a self-deprecating
depiction of Jews and used that reading to justify anti-Semitic reviews of the
production.
130
What Piscator had intended as “a unified antifascist front” amid the
increasing presence of Nazis in Berlin, turned out to be “salt in an open wound.”
131

129
Monty Jacobs, “Shylock in der Arena,” Vossische Zeitung 122 (14 March 1921). The
review is reprinted in translation in Andrew G. Bonnell, Shylock in Germany:
Antisemitism and the German Theatre form Enlightenment to the Nazis (London and New
York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), 105.
130
Andrew Bonnell discusses the racialized response to the production in Shylock in
Germany (2008), 102-9.
131
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), vii.
61
Piscator’s intention for theater to “communicate critical responses which, translated into
practical politics, might possibly have stopped this fascism,” did not achieve this goal.
132

The circulation of Heartfield’s antifascist, satirical montages, however, generated no such
ambiguity over the artist’s political intentions. In the pages of left-wing periodicals such
as the AIZ, which had a print run of half a million copies in the years leading up to the
Nazi rise to power, Heartfield became one of the Nazi regime’s most outspoken
opponents.
133

Piscator has dominated my narrative of “Brechtian” aesthetics to this point
because, although Brecht was in contact with Heartfield during the Weimar Republic and
toward the end of their respective exile periods, the two did not collaborate until after
World War II. Piscator came to an early formulation of epic theater by 1924, the year
Brecht arrived in Berlin. Through juxtapositions of image, music, and narrative
fragments, Piscator believed he could convince his audiences to gather and become
involved in the political process. Brecht and Piscator continued to conceptualize epic
theater during their collaborations in 1926.
134
As John Willett explains, “it was [Brecht]
who theorized about these things in print—Piscator scarcely did so—but it was Piscator
who worked them out in practice.”
135
Brecht was six years younger than Piscator and

132
Ibid.
133
In 1933, AIZ moved to Prague, where it continued to publish on communist and anti-
fascist topics until 1938 when Czechoslovakia mobilized. Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar
in Exile: Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach (London
and New York: Verso, 1987/2006), 364-66; and Sabine Kriebel, “Radical Left Magazines
in Berlin” (2013): 852.
134
Brecht absorbed the teachings of Piscator directly, working since 1926 as a member of
Piscator’s collective and helping to write the scripts Rasputin, Schwejk, and Konjunktor
(Oil Boom). Patterson, The Revolution in German Theatre (1981), 154.
135
John Willett, Brecht in Context (1998), 118.
62
learned from his mentor about political theater before eventually becoming more
committed to theater as a pedagogical institution than Piscator himself.
Brecht would build upon Piscator’s Proletarian Theater and collective working
process, ultimately moving away from the agitprop model. Piscator wrote at the end of
the 1920s that, “the theater was no longer trying to appeal to the audience’s emotions
alone, was no longer speculating on their emotional responsiveness—it consciously
appealed to their intellect.”
136
In practice, however, Brecht did more than Piscator to
trigger this rational and judicious type of contemplation. Piscator’s use of technology
became increasingly complicated in the late 1920s and after the Second World War. The
one lasting commonality between their practices throughout their respective
developments was the use of projectors, film, and text on stage.
Piscator’s representations of politics suggested concrete solutions to political
problems and social strife. Brecht’s characters, meanwhile, turned to the audience and
asked them to judge for themselves in ethically murky situations. Examples from The
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny; 1929)
involve a boxing match, prostitution, a courtroom scene, and bribery. The Caucasian
Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis; 1944) features a judgment of Solomon
scenario at the end. Brecht accommodated critical reflection, whereas Piscator seemed
not to trust the audience entirely with that undertaking. Margot Morgan writes, “Brecht’s
theatre was larger in scope than agitprop, focusing on the system of capitalist oppression
rather than on what action to take in a specific situation.”
137
In a landmark 1930 essay

136
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 49.
137
Margot Morgan, Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe: Imagination and
Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 55.
63
Brecht called for the intensification of word, music and set design in order to present
individuals as socially constructed and malleable.
138
His defamiliarization effects took
forms such as unconcealed lighting structures, pregnant pauses, and sudden bursts of
song. In 1936, he articulated how, in epic theater, “the artist’s object is to appear strange
and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and
his performance.”
139

When artists in the post-World War II years took up “epic theater” as a political
or visual framework, they generally acknowledged only Brecht’s better-known
articulation of the principle. Because The Political Theater (1930) was Piscator’s only
major published text on his staging methods, compared to Brecht’s prolific oeuvre, there
is no single term with which Piscator is associated in the scholarly literature.
140
Piscator
twice founded and dissolved his company, “The Proletarian Theater” (first established in
1920) and scholars also use that name to refer to Piscator’s didactic staging practices.
141

Piscator himself wavered between referring to his dramaturgical method (which changed

138
Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theater is Epic Theater” [1930] in Brecht on Theater:
the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 37-
38.
139
Bertolt Brecht, “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting” [1936] in Brecht on Theater,
3
rd
Edition, Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, eds. (New York and London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 151-52.
140
According to Brecht, writing in third-person, “Piscator put on political theatre before
the playwright [Brecht]… The supporters of Piscator disputed for a while with those of
the playwright as to which of the two had discovered the epic style of performance. In
fact they both evolved it at the same time in different cities; P[iscator] more in the
staging, the playwright in the play.” See C. D. Innes, Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre:
The Development of Modern German Drama (London and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1972), 192. Piscator’s 1929 The Political Theatre was also published
the year before Brecht’s seminal text, “The Modern Theater is the Epic Theater.”
141
See Robert Heynen, Degeneration and Revolution: Radical Cultural Politics and the
Body in Weimar Germany (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 536-8.
64
over time) as “proletarian” and “the epic or political style.”
142
When I begin to discuss
“epic theater” or “Brechtian aesthetics” in regards to the postwar period without
mentioning both directors by name, it is not that Brecht and Piscator penned a unified
theory. Rather, artists and researchers after Brecht’s death in 1956 began to treat the
dramaturgical legacies of Brecht and Piscator as a single entity, which they variously
referred to as “epic theater,” “political theater,” or “Brechtian aesthetics.”
As Brecht attempted to reconcile Piscator’s early Proletarian Theater projects with
his own pedagogical form of theater, he wrote:
How can the theatre be both instructive and entertaining? How can it be removed
from the intellectual drug trade and turn from a place of illusions to a place of
experiences? How can the unfree, ignorant people of our century, with a thirst for
freedom and a hunger for knowledge; how can the tortured and heroic, abused and
ingenious, changeable and world-changing people of this great and ghastly
century obtain their own theatre that will help them to master the world and
themselves?
143

This huge ambition for epic theater set the terms for postwar artistic and theatrical
production. Visual artists and theater professionals educated in the Weimar Republic and
after World War II read Brecht and carried into the postwar decades this question of how
to make sure the audience knows it has agency over the forces of history.

Repressing John Heartfield’s Contemporaneity in a Divided World

142
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), vii.
143
Bertolt Brecht, “On Experimental Theatre” [1939] in Brecht on Theatre (2015), 145.
65
Heartfield was chased out of Germany in 1933, settling in Prague until 1938 when
his situation there became untenable.
144
He lived in London from 1939 to 1950, at which
point, unsuccessful in his application to stay in the United Kingdom, he returned to
Leipzig, East Germany, and then to East Berlin.
145
Until his death in 1968, East German
authorities suspected Heartfield of having connections to Western secret service agencies
and for not returning sooner than 1950.
146
The KPD, of which he was a founding
member, rejected his re-application in 1950 and only after much insistence by colleagues
was he re-admitted in 1956.
147
The German Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in
East Berlin also finally offered him full membership in 1956, with his first major
exhibition the following year and a professor position in 1960. His archival
correspondence shows invitations to exhibit his interwar and wartime work at venues all
over the world, but curators and scholars were not interested in what the renowned anti-
fascist monteur had to say after the fall of the Third Reich.
148
The new work he produced

144
In addition to the impending Nazi takeover of the Sudetendland, Jost Hermand writes,
“in 1937, When his satires were again exhibited in the gallery Mánes in Prague the Czech
Ministry of Cultural Affairs succumbed to Nazi pressure and had most of Heartfield’s
polemical works against Hitler and his followers removed from the exhibition.” See
“John Heartfield or The Art of Cutting Out Hitler,” in Unmasking Hitler: Cultural
Representations of Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present, ed. Klaus L.
Berghahn and Jost Hermand (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005/2007), 71-72.
145
Heartfield’s anti-fascist work during his exile years in Prague and London have been
examined, for example, in Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile (2006).
146
Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Honnef, eds., John Heartfield (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1992), 313.
147
Nancy Roth, “Heartfield’s Collaboration,” Oxford Art Journal 29.3 (2006): 414;
Doherty, “‘See: We are All Neurasthenics!’” (1997), 82.
148
ADK Heartfield Archive: Lfd. Nr. 198 Erwin Piscator an Heartfield 1959-66; Lfd. Nr.
322 Berliner Ensemble an Heartfield 1952-59; Lfd. Nr. 410 Komische Oper/Felsenstein
an Heartfield, 1963; Lfd. Nr. 177 Otto Nagel an Heartfield 1958-60; Lfd. Nr. 226 Hans-
Ulrich Schmückle an Heartfield 1966-67; Lfd. Nr. 329 Bienal de Sao Paulo an Heartfield,
1962; Lfd. Nr. 370 Deutsches Theater + Kammerspiele an Heartfield 1950-68; Lfd. Nr.
376 documenta III an. Heartfield 1964.
66
in East Berlin included stage designs, program booklets, posters for theater productions,
some political montage, and book jackets.
149
Prior to the war Walter Benjamin had
remarked, “you need only think of the work of John Heartfield, whose technique made
the book cover into a political instrument.”
150
In East Berlin, however, Heartfield faced
closer scrutiny from the SED than he had in the Weimar Republic and his postwar work
in these media were no longer discussed as political instruments.
Most monographs on Heartfield end in 1933 or 1938 and mention casually in a
footnote or concluding section that Heartfield’s career was only half over at this point.
151

As art historians have focused on the politics of his interwar montages and concluded
their studies of his career shortly after the Nazi rise to power, they have, in effect, forced
Heartfield into a second exile from the literature on postwar art of which he was,
nonetheless, an active participant. The lacuna of theater from these studies is
symptomatic of the absence of Heartfield’s practice in the historiography of postwar art,
since theatrical stage work was in fact a substantial part of his postwar practice. One of
the only considerations of this postwar output by Ilse-Maria Dorfstecher, in 1991,
discusses a supermarket scene from Heartfield’s stage design for Mother Riba in East

149
For Brecht’s support of Heartfield through commissions such as book covers and
theater publicity materials in the 1950s, see John Willett, Brecht in Context (1998), 161.
150
Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” [1934] in Selected Writings (1999), 774-5.
151
Studies that bracket out discussion of Heartfield’s post-World War II output include
David Evans, John Heartfield. Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung und Volks-Illustrierte 1930-
1938 (New York: Kent Fine Art, 1992); Freya Mühlhaupt, ed., John Heartfield:
Zeitausschnitte: Fotomontagen 1918-1938 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2009);
Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image (2012); Diana M. Bush, The
Dialectical Object: John Heartfield, 1915-1933 (Diss. Columbia University, 2013); and
Sabine Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield
(2014); This phenomenon is not as acute in the Grosz literature, but still informs a study
such as Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and
Radicalism in Crisis, 1918-1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
67
Berlin in 1955 as an “overture to pop art” (fig. 9).
152
This is one of the few references in
the Heartfield literature that sets his postwar work in dialogue with his contemporaries in
the postwar period.
Scholars who do contend with Heartfield’s postwar practice dismiss it as toothless
or derivative. In 1963 the art historian Peter Selz, a German émigré to the United States,
wrote that Heartfield, “has remained more an honored memento of the past than a man
engaged in current struggles and problems.”
153
As I shall discuss in more detail in what
follows, Heartfield was splicing and manipulating Soviet avant-garde films and making
montages about the proliferation of nuclear arms during the Cold War standoff between
the Soviet Union and the West, arguably grappling with the most urgent “struggles and
problems” facing geopolitics in the postwar decades. In 1993, Arthur Danto wrote, “his
art, so far as I can tell, did not keep its edge. A great political artist requires a serious
political enemy.”
154
In light of such statements, it is important to remember that the
“enemy” of Heartfield’s interwar montages was not Hitler alone but rather a vicious
combination of totalitarianism and capitalism, ideologies that continued to abound during
the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
My goal here is not to argue for the political criticality or aesthetic merits of
Heartfield’s postwar work, but rather to show how highlighting rather than avoiding or
deriding that part of his practice can help to re-evaluate the historical frameworks we use

152
Ilse-Maria Dorfstecher, “John Heartfield als Bühnenbildner 1951 bis 1966,” in John
Heartfield (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1991), reprinted in John Heartfield (1992),
238.
153
Peter Selz, “John Heartfield’s ‘Photomontages,’” The Massachusetts Review 4.2
(Winter 1963): 335.
154
Arthur Danto, The Madonna of the Future (2000), 9. Danto wrote this text in 1993,
notably before East German archives were opened.
68
to address the careers of artists who have worked under radically different regimes or in a
wide variety of media—two circumstances closely related in Heartfield’s case. He has
been discussed as an anti-fascist montage artist ad nauseam, but how can that picture of
the artist be reconciled with the one I will sketch below, of the theatrical scenic designer
who worked in East Germany at the same time as Gerhard Richter, A. R. Penck, and
other “neo-avant-garde” artists? The terms for contemporary art west of the Berlin Wall
by the time of Heartfield’s last works between 1966 and 1968—neo-Dada, Fluxus, new
realism (neue Realismus), and Pop—similarly left little room for the survival of a Dada
artist and his working method. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Dadaists Hugo Ball,
Raoul Hausmann, Richard Hulsenbeck, Hans Richter, Tristan Tzara, and the younger
artist-historian Robert Motherwell inscribed their stories into history, distinguishing Dada
activities in Zurich and Berlin between 1917 and 1923 from the anti-art attitudes of
postwar figures such as Yves Klein and Daniel Spoerri.
155
As a result of these nostalgic
framings of the past, Heartfield’s contemporary practice in the 1960s became
increasingly less “contemporary.”
Heartfield is the central artistic figure in the present chapter but the
historiographical blindspot of which he was victim affected others as well. Between 1945
and 1970, the scholarship and critical discourse on Marcel Duchamp undertook a similar

155
Richard Hulsenbeck, Mit Witz, Licht und Grütze: Auf den Spuren des Dadaismus
(Wiesbaden: Limes, 1957), translated as Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (New York:
Viking Press, 1974) and Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (New York:
Viking Press, 1974). Hubert F. van den Berg claims that in the 1950s and 1960s,
Hulsenbeck, Hausmann, and Richter “started to raise the market value of dada (and
discreditnew, so-called ‘neo-dada’ initiatives).” See “From a New Art to a New Life and
a New Man: Avant-Garde Utopianism in Dada,” in The Invention of Politics in the
European Avant-Garde, 1906-1940, ed. Sascha Bru and Gunther Martens (Amsterdam
and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 135.
69
partitioning. Both artists were active until their deaths in 1968. Duchamp continued to
organize group exhibitions, make new works, and issue multiples of earlier ones. The
artist Daniel Spoerri claimed that in the early 1960s, “Duchamp was unknown. He’d been
totally forgotten. No one knew anymore how he was doing, and I even became convinced
that he died.”
156
When Swiss and German institutions began re-examining Duchamp’s
interwar work in the 1970s, historians focused on Duchamp’s pre-World War II output,
specifically his connection to interwar Dada.
157
Writing about “post-Dada appropriation”
in 1973, Lucy Lippard wrote that, “starting from their Duchampian notion of ‘claiming,’
appropriation in the 1960s became more political as art-world artists borrowed John
Heartfield’s classic poster-makers’ technique of co-opting media and other familiar
images for new and often satirical ends.”
158
Finally, after Heartfield’s death, and at the
expense of depoliticizing Duchamp, Heartfield’s intermedial appropriation started to
become radical and current again.

156
Wies Smals, “MAT: Ein gesprek met Spoerri en Gerstner,” Museumjournaal, 15.1
(Feb 1970): 33.
157
See Wolf Rainer Wendt, Ready-Made: Das Problem und der philosophische Begriff
des ästhetischen Verhaltens, dargestellt an Marcel Duchamp (Meisenhaeim am Glan:
Verlag Anton Hain, 1970); and Helmut Friedel, Thomas Girst, Matthias Mühling, Felicia
Rappe, Eds., Marcel Duchamp in München 1912 (Munich: Städtische Galerie im
Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München and Schirmer/Mosel, 2012). Leda Cempellin
explains that the postwar rediscovery of Duchamp occurred slightly earlier in France than
in Germany, writing that around 1960, “a surge of interest towards the Dadaist artist in
Paris was supported by the publication of his book of writings Marchand du Sel and a
monograph by Robert Lebel, Sur Marcel Duchamp published by Trianon.” See
Cempellin, “Multiples in Late Modern Sculpture: Influences Within and Beyond Danlie
Spoerri’s 1959 Edition MAT,” Nierika: Revista de Estudios de Arte 7 (June 2015): 64.
158
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-1972
(New York: Praeger, 1973), xv.
70
Historiographically, Heartfield’s narrative is largely informed by a biography by
his brother Herzfelde, which excluded his stage work altogether.
159
Scenic design was a
large part of Heartfield’s postwar output, and in order to address this later work in any
significant way, one has to undertake research in archives of both theater and art
institutions. Further, Germanist historians still struggle with the asynchronicities that the
Third Reich’s interruption of modernism caused and how to narrate stories that survived
this caesura. Lastly, the absence of Heartfield’s postwar output in the art historical record
is an artifact of Cold War cultural politics.
The dichotomous thinking that positions socialist realism against abstraction, and
obscures the mutual practices of visual appropriation and irony in Heartfield’s practice
and those of his younger contemporaries in both Germanys, has had significant
implications for the way postwar art history has been written. This tendency persisted
even after the opening of former East German archives allowed for comparative studies
of East and West Germany in the 1990s and 2000s. Art historian April Eisman argues
that although many East German artists traveled regularly, were in contact with West
German artists, and read West German newspapers and magazines, “the idea that East
German art and artists were cut off from the West is widespread in English-language
scholarship.”
160
Art historian Nancy Roth, for example, claimed in 2006 that in the
postwar years, “Heartfield’s work took the form of a recuperative operation, an attempt to

159
Wieland Herzfelde, John Heartfield: Leben und Werk. Dargestellt von seinem Bruder
Wieland Herzfelde (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1970). Nancy Roth speculates that
“Heartfield’s theatre work may well have appeared marginal, especially to the extent it
figured in Wieland’s ongoing rivalry with Grosz.” Herzfelde would have had to admit a
substantial amount of collaboration with Grosz n order to address Heartfield’s theater
work. Roth, “Heartfield’s Collaboration” (2006): 408.
160
April A. Eisman, “East German Art and the Permeability of the Berlin Wall,” German
Studies Review 38.3 (October 2015): 598.
71
reconstitute the identity of the interwar years… The effort was never really
successful.”
161
For authors like Peter Selz and Arthur Danto, writing from the United
States and Western Europe, Heartfield’s double-edged interrogation of the West’s anti-
communist panic and Soviet socialist realism, did not even register as critique. When
they looked back on Heartfield’s interwar anti-fascist work they saw German fascism as a
largely bygone racially-oriented ideology rather than an economic issue and thus no
longer necessitating Heartfield’s socialist critique. In 1967, Guy Debord, not operating
under the spell of capitalism, reminded his readers that, “fascism was [also] an extremist
defense of the bourgeois economy threatened by crisis and by proletarian subversion.”
162
This was the subversion Heartfield and Piscator had taken part in, which had to be
misremembered and made invisible in the 1960s for the United States and Western
Europe to be able to wage war on communism.

Flickering Images of Lenin and Stalin, 1951

One of Heartfield’s most powerful postwar film montages was a short one he
produced for Brecht in 1951 for a production of Brecht’s play The Mother (Die
Mutter).
163
This montage provides a bridge between Heartfield’s interwar work and his

161
Roth, “Heartfield’s Collaboration” (2006), 412.
162
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [1967] (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970), n.p.
163
Brecht returned to East Germany in 1948, where he directed the Berliner Ensemble
until his death in 1956. This was a Berliner Ensemble guest performance at the Deutsches
Theater, with stage sets by Caspar Neher, painted projections by Hainer Hill, and film
and photo-projections by Heartfield and Herzfelde. See Gabrielle H. Cody and Evret
Sprinchorn, ed., The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, vol. 2 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007), 930. For more on Brecht’s exile and last decade in
East Berlin, see Klaus Völker, Brecht: A Biography (London: Marion Boyars, 1979);
72
lesser-known postwar practice. In The Mother, Brecht recontextualizes Maxim Gorky’s
1906 novel to take place during the 1917 Russian Revolution, but keeps the basic plot
about a young working-class man, Pavel Vlasova, and his mother, Pelagea, and their
development from political ambivalence to fervent desire for revolution. A classic
Brechtian learning play (Lehrstück) completed on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, The
Mother illustrates the process of politicization, concluding with the unflappable sixty-
year-old Pelagea taking up the red flag and marching through the streets with younger
workers at her side. The Mother received its world premiere in Berlin in 1932 with stage
sets and text projections by Caspar Neher. Stylized text projections reappeared between
every scene, announcing plot turns, dates, and locations.
164
Hanns Eisler contributed a
score of incidental music for the play’s New York premiere in 1935.
165
For the 1951
revival, Heartfield, with help from Herzfelde, added several photographic projections and
the concluding film montage.

Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980); Bruce Cook,
Brecht in Exile (New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1982); Ronald Speirs, ed.,
Brecht’s Poetry of Political Exile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and
Ekkehard Schall, The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre
(London: Bloomsbury and Methuen Drama, 2015).
164
My observations on the 1951 staging come from reviews and a video recording, BBA
AVM 13.0055 in ADK Brecht Archive. The half-curtain was a hallmark of Brecht’s
productions, developed in collaboration with Caspar Neher. It concealed only the bottom
half of the stage, allowing a partial view of the scenery changes. See Marc Silberman,
ed., Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio (London: Methuen, 2000).
165
The script was drafted in collaboration with Hanns Eisler, Slatan Dudow and Günther
Weisenborn See Teresa Ritterhod, “Ver/Ratlossigkeit: Benjamin, Brecht, and Die
Mutter,” Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht Jahrbuch 24 (1999): 246-62; and Eric Salehi, “No
Brecht-fest in America: Revisiting the Theatre Union’s 1935 Production of Mother,” On-
Stage Studies 21 (1998): 75-97. The director Ruth Berlau also staged the play in 1950 in
Leipzig with a stage design based on Caspar Neher’s original.
73
On the opening night, in January 1951, visitors poured into the Deutsches Theater
in East Berlin.
166
The Berlin Wall would not be erected for another decade, so this highly
anticipated production was accessible to Berliners from occupation zones East and West.
It was the first time the play was directed by its author, Brecht, and was also a reunion for
some of his collaborators who fled Hitler’s Germany and had not been back since. The
first image visitors saw was Pablo Picasso’s Dove (1949) suspended over the stage and
converted from a small lithograph to a large-scale embroidered tapestry (fig. 10).
167

Picasso, an avowed communist, lived in France (Western Europe), whereas East Berlin
had recently become a pocket of Eastern Europe. The dove was a symbol of hope for the
historical continuity of the modern project interrupted by fascism, but also of spatial
solidarity across a newly defined border. This scrim staked out a highly politicized grey
area between prewar and postwar, East and West, and the media of visual art versus
theater.
At three times life size, Heartfield and Herzfelde’s photographic projections
featured historical figures in three groups, representing “The Vlasovas of All Countries”
or the proletariat, “The Great Revolutionaries,” Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao
Zedong, and “The Warmongers,” Wilhelm II, George V, John D. Rockefeller, and

166
David Barnett, A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015), 89-92; Stephen Unwin describes the production as “renowned” in A Guide
to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
167
Variations of this design in circulation as early as 1947 were widely recognized as
symbolizing the Communist Party’s “Peace Movement” against the Cold War. The
World Congress for the Partisans of Peace also commissioned a version in 1950. The
Berliner Ensemble featured it on brochures, posters, banners, and the stage itself. See
Jonathan Harris, The Utopian Globalists: Artists of the Worldwide Revolution, 1919-2009
(Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 56; Matthew Israel, Kill for Peace:
American Artists Against the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 56;
and “Poster Art for the Party,” in Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 117-33.
74
Georges Clemenceau (fig. 11). The film montage filled the entire proscenium for the last
two minutes of the production. Set to Eisler’s Soviet-style marching song, “In Praise of
Dialectic,” workers and singers joined ranks on stage, as a sequence of historical film
footage streamed over them (fig. 12-13). The live figures were partially obscured as the
lower lights dimmed and the film projections dominated. In the projection, audiences saw
a flag unfurling, the street filling with demonstrators, and cannons blasting. Heartfield
spliced in clips of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao addressing young comrades (fig. 14-15). A shot
of hundreds of people cuts to a field of balloons being released in front of the iconic Saint
Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, and floating up past a monumental poster of Lenin’s face.
Heartfield appropriated footage from the Soviet films Marchlewski, May First in
Moscow, The End of St. Petersburg, and a shot of thousands storming the Winter
Palace.
168
A sudden accelerando to the end of the song was matched visually by a flood
of film clips from the Russian Revolution, as lower lights brought the live actors back
into focus, the projection screens rose abruptly, and two more curtains jerked horizontally
to either side, giving way to the street scene again. Picasso’s dove dropped back down
over the stage, as a montage of historical revolution materialized into the here and now of
East Berlin. Heartfield’s transfer of these formal and procedural operations from two-
dimensional photomontages to moving images that activated the entire space of the stage,
echoed his electronic stage designs for Piscator in the 1920s.

168
The latter footage was taken from the 1920 re-dramatization of the 1917 October
Revolution, involving more then 2,000 actors and extras. Marianne Mildenberger, Die
Anwendung von Film und Projektion als Mittel szenischer Gestaltung (Diss. University
of Cologne, 1961), 228-9.
75
The film montage was the only substantial change to Neher’s 1932 design.
169
This
addition, however short, had profound political implications. In 1951, Heartfield’s
electronic imaging and montage strategies, based on Soviet aesthetic models and footage,
presented a new horizon for the possibilities of art and technology in East Germany.
Heartfield and Brecht’s visualization of a paradigm shift in the history of the proletariat
offered East German audiences an opportunity to relate to their newly adopted Soviet
past, as it overlapped with earlier German theater traditions from the Weimar period.
Under new pressures in the early 1950s, however, Neher, Heartfield, and Herzfelde’s
projections for The Mother met two divergent needs: critically examining the new
regime, and also adhering to the formal strictures of socialist realism. While 1951 was a
highpoint in the SED’s enforcement of socialist realism, montage and electronic imaging
are highly flexible media in the way they signify for various audiences.
170
While
Heartfield’s montage practice was fueled by mutually inflected critiques of capitalism
and fascism, his postwar work did not necessarily endorse Stalin or the Soviet Union’s
handling of its satellite states.
Heartfield knew East German authorities were monitoring him, and Brecht was
also aware of potential undercover audience members and the risks of censorship.
171

169
Bertolt Brecht, Caspar Neher (Darmstadt: Hessisches Landesmuseum, 1963).
170
Grosz claimed he and Heartfield invented montage in 1916 to sneak subversive
political imagery past censors. See Hans Richter, Dada: Kunst und Antikunst (Cologne:
Dumont, 1963), translation in Dawn Ades, Photomontage (New York: Phaidon, 1976),
10. Art historians have supplied a corresponding tale of World War I soldiers who,
unable to get letters past officials because of graphic descriptions of violence, pasted
together fragments from illustrated papers. See Peter Selz, “John Heartfield’s
‘Photomontages’” (1963): 310.
171
David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945-1949
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 572; and Claudia Mesch, Art at the Berlin
76
Heartfield’s 1951 montage of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao vigorously gesticulating was
ostensibly a display of the power of their political leadership that also seems to have
given visual form to mounting public resentment of the Russian occupation within East
Germany.
172
The intertextuality of the image is not apparent in the stills alone, but in the
rapidity with which they barraged the audience. Rendered with light rather than paint or
print media, they were transitory and flickering. Projected on textured surfaces, their
illusory nature was not masked but accentuated.
173
They were—as Richard Meyer
described the projection of magnified images in an entirely different context—“flickering
yet monumental,” a “spectre” brought into “shimmering visibility.”
174

The contingent, flickering form in which Heartfield’s images were rendered on
the various surfaces and fabrics of the stage raise questions about the legacy of the
historical episodes they illustrated. Although there is no archival evidence to support the
idea that Heartfield critically directed the transitory nature of the projection toward Stalin
in this context, it is conceivable based on the work he was doing or was exposed to
through Piscator in the interwar years. Heartfield’s two-fold critique of totalitarianism
and capitalist greed, which first developed between World War I and the Nazi rise to

Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys (London and New York: Tauris,
2008), 26.
172
Russia’s demands of war reparations from East Germany would lead to a massive
worker’s uprising in1953. Randall W. Stone, Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and
Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 30.
173
Brecht describes this effect in his 1940 “Kurze Beschreibung einer neuen Technik der
Schauspielkunst, die einen Verfremdungseffekt hervorbringt,” Werke: Grosse
kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter ausgabe, Vol. 22 (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag and
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 641-59.
174
Meyer refers to projections of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs on the façade of the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1989. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality
in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 209-10.
77
power, was a precursor for East Germany’s alternative modernity.
175
Under the guise of
epic theater, Heartfield’s critical realism could be narrowly acceptable to Soviet
authorities, without necessarily accepting the political implications of their formal
guidelines.
Socialist realism’s official definition in the Eastern Bloc wavered between a
conceptual idea and a set of formal principles, changing as it spread among Soviet
satellite states during the Cold War.
176
The former president of the German Academy of
Arts in East Berlin, Johannes Becher, held that socialist realism should offer a moral
example but could neither be defined solely in formal terms nor separated from a
humanistic view of the world.
177
Erwin Pracht, a scholar of aesthetics at Humboldt
University in East Berlin, was more ideological but equally vague: “Socialist realism is
the method of artistic creation from the standpoint of the revolutionary working class
from the position of the Marxist-Leninist labor movement.”
178
Following Stalin’s death in
1953 there was a thaw of cultural policy in the Eastern Bloc, and enforcement of socialist

175
Although East Germany did not reflect the historical notion of a modern liberal state,
it nonetheless made significant social and economic progress. Katherine Pence and Paul
Betts describe East Germany’s gender equality, economic structure, and visual culture as
an “alternative modernity” (Gegenmoderne) in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday
Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 12.
176
See Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
177
“Sozialistischer Realismus ist nicht nur ein Gestaltungsprinzip, sondern auch ein
menschliches Verhaltensprinzip. Man kann nicht sich als Künstler zum Prinzip des
sozialistischen Realismus bekennen und als Mensch in seinem Verhältnis zur Umwelt
und zu anderen Menschen einer sozialistisch-realistischen Verhaltungsweise
widerstreben. Der Künstler umfaßt den ganzen Menschen und nicht einen Teil von ihm.”
Johannes Becher, Über Literatur und Kunst (East Berlin, 1962), 464.
178
“Sozialistischer Realismus ist die Methode des künstlerischen Schaffens vom
Standpunkt der revolutionären Arbeiterklasse, von der Position der marxistisch-
leninistischen Arbeiterbewegung.” Erwin Pracht, “Sozialistischer Realismus als
künstlerische Methode” in Weimarer Beiträge, Zeitschrift für Literatur, Wissenschaft,
Ästhetik und Kunsttheorie 10 (1971): 19-24.
78
realist policy was further relaxed in 1956 following Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the
Twentieth Party Congress, which was critical of Stalin.
179
Given the variation in these
understandings of socialist realism, one can appreciate the complexity of the decisions
Heartfield and Brecht faced in East Germany.
According to Brecht, socialist realism represented life from a socialist point of
view and also showed “characters and events as historical and alterable and as
contradictory.”
180
This Brechtian socialist realism was not a set of formal principles but
rather an imperative to make art educational, honest, and accessible. His plays, however,
were constantly suspect in East Berlin due to their critiques of institutional structures and
the unpredictability that his dramaturgy entailed. For Brecht, the socialist realist work
might look in one way but signify in another. In 1953 he wrote, “for a truly socialist art
the question of quality is politically decisive… No painter can paint with hands that
tremble for fear of the verdict of some official who may be well-trained politically and
very conscious of his political responsibilities yet be badly trained aesthetically and
unconscious of his responsibility to the artist.”
181
Here, Brecht cleverly reversed the
rhetoric of the politicians quoted above and made aesthetic freedom out to be an
explicitly socialist quality. On the other hand, Brecht always maintained that socialist
realism had great potential. He re-articulated this position in 1954 according to the
following tenets:

179
See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York and London:
Penguin, 2005), 424; and Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and
Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2007), 162.
180
This statement appears in a note from 1954 in Erwin Pracht, “Sozialistischer
Realismus als künstlerische Methode” (1971), 269.
181
Bertolt Brecht, in a note from his archive, published as, “Cultural Policy and Academy
of Arts” [1953] in Willett, Brecht on Theater (1964), 267-9.
79
1) Socialist Realism means realistically reproducing men’s life together by artistic
means from a socialist point of view. It is reproduced in such a way as to promote
insight into society’s mechanisms and stimulate socialist impulses. In the case of
Socialist Realism a large part of the pleasure which all art must provoke is
pleasure at the possibility of society’s mastering man’s fate.
2) A Socialist Realist work of art lays bare the dialectical laws of movement of the
social mechanism, whose revelation makes the mastering of man’s fate easier. It
provokes pleasure in their recognition and observation.
3) A Socialist Realist work of art shows characters and events as historical and
alterable, and as contradictory. This entails a great change; a serious effort has to
be made to find new means of representation.
4) A Socialist Realist work of art is based on a working-class viewpoint and appeals
to all men of good will. It shows them the aims and outlook of the working class,
which is trying to raise human productivity to an undreamt-of extent by
transforming society and abolishing exploitation.
5) The Socialist Realist performance of old classical works is based on the view that
mankind has preserved those works which gave artistic expression to advances
towards a continually stronger, bolder and more delicate humanity. Such
performance accordingly emphasizes those works’ progressive ideas.
182

Few East German authorities or Western art critics were willing to concede that such a
stylistic notion was a highly idiosyncratic critical apparatus in the hands of each artist.
Returning to Heartfield’s film montage in The Mother, we can appreciate how
electronic media was uniquely positioned to appease and question authority in a single
operation. Heartfield established as early as 1917 that he was aware of film montage’s
political flexibility by using it to produce pro-war films for the German Foreign Office by
day and to repudiate the bourgeois war by night.
183
West of the iron curtain, Heartfield
was not critical enough, and east of it, he was too critical. In a divided Germany, both
things could be true, a single artist and a single artistic idiom in the Cold War had
diametrically opposed meanings in different political contexts.

182
In a 1954 note in Willett, Brecht on Theatre (1964), 269.
183
Regarding Heartfield, Grosz, and Herzfelde’s work on anti-Entente films toward the
end of the war, see Peter Jelavich, “German Culture in the Great War,” (2002), 55-56 and
Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image (2012), 98.
80
Destabilizing the temporal and medium-specific frameworks that scholars have
used to both understand and marginalize Heartfield, the political force of his montage
practice from the Weimar period survived fascism and became newly relevant for theater
audiences in East Germany. His epic theater aesthetic was a motivating referent as well
for artists and directors even across the Berlin Wall and into the 1970s. The survival of
Heartfield’s montage strategies, temporally, over the “zero hour” of 1945, and spatially,
across the Iron Curtain, is tied to the dissemination of Brecht’s plays and theoretical
writings. The postwar adoption and modification of Brecht’s dramaturgy should also be
seen as the adoption of Heartfield’s visual aesthetic.

Theaters of War and Postwar Theaters, 1955-1966

Between Heartfield’s film work on The Mother in 1951 and his death in 1968, he
continued to appropriate images from news sources, as well as modify montages he
produced years earlier in ways that reflected his possibilities for representation within
East Berlin. In these years, the artists with whom Heartfield was in contact were far from
acquiescent. Debates on socialist realism and artistic autonomy broke out at the German
Academy of Arts in East Berlin in summer 1953.
184
The day after a massive June 17
workers’ uprising, Brecht was put in charge of a special commission at the Academy for

184
See Arnulf Baring, Uprising in East Germany: June 17, 1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1972), 30-49. See also Hans Meyer, “An Aesthetic Debate of 1951:
Comment on a Text by Hanns Eisler,” New German Critique 1.2 (April 1974): 58-62;
and James Aulich and Marta Sylvestrová, Political Posters in Central and Eastern
Europe 1945-95 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 26.
81
reforming cultural policy in East Germany.
185
That summer, his colleagues called for an
overhaul of the procedures for determining radio and film content, as well as opening of
the borders for artists in international juried exhibitions, more stylistic autonomy, and
cabinet-level governmental positions for members (Mitglieder) of the Academy.
186

Although Heartfield’s montages from the 1950s were anodyne enough not to land
him in prison, they nevertheless continued his earlier critiques of the connections
between global capitalism, government structures, wealthy elites, and warfare. In his
1955 poster, Call for Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons! (Fordert: Verbot der
Atomwaffen!), a serpent branded with the word “Atomkrieg” (nuclear warfare) wraps
itself around a floating globe in the center of the composition (fig. 16). A disembodied
arm reaches into the picture frame to strangle the serpent as a white tongue flails out of
its strained mouth and forms a dollar sign. Instead of explicitly denouncing the nuclear
and hydrogen bombs that were then being tested by the United States or the Soviet
Union, Heartfield’s poster addresses a global problem. While Heartfield thematized a key
contemporary issue in the poster’s text, the composition was directly lifted from
Heartfield’s own 1936 poster, Make way for Peace! (Weg frei für den Frieden!; fig. 17).
Here, what Nancy Roth referred to as an unsuccessful “recuperative operation” could
equally be considered a renewal of a visual form in light of new political conditions.
In October 1956, eight months after the thaw in socialist realist policies that
followed Krushchev’s “secret speech,” the Hungarian Revolution raised anxieties among

185
Patrick Harkin, “Brecht and 17 June 1953: A Reassessment,” in Brecht and the GDR:
Politics, Culture, Posterity, Edinburgh German Yearbook, Vol. 5, ed. Laura Bradley and
Karen Leeder (Rochster, NY: Camden House, 2011), 83-99.
186
The declaration from the academy, “Erklärung der Deutschen Akademie der Künste,”
was published in Neues Deutschland (12 July 1953) and is reprinted in Brecht on Art and
Politics, ed. Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015).
82
the SED and revived tighter controls on socialist realist doctrine.
187
Heartfield’s 1959
montage, The Freedom of the Beast of Prey (Raubtierfreiheit) again depicts a snake, this
time rearing its head over a border crossing and tempting a frog to make the perilous leap
across the gate into “freedom” (fig. 18). Heartfield depicted the frog frozen in midair, its
tensile extremities seemingly unsure of where to land. The accompanying text reads:
“‘Come to us in the West’ / said the snake to the frog / ‘Here freedom reigns / Here you
can fatten up!’ / He hopped / and said, ‘I am so free’ / and allowed him to taste.”
188
Is it
freedom that the frog tastes? Is the frog leaping into the snake’s jaws? Is the frog only
sampling West German freedoms because he is in fact skeptical of them? This could be
understood as a critique of either side of the border. Claudia Mesch writes, “one might
say that [Heartfield’s] own art, like the little frog, barely survived his border crossing.”
189

Perhaps the reading intended for SED officials was that the remilitarization and allied
occupation in the West indicated an illusory sense of democracy there, but the frog is also
so eager to escape the East, that he is apparently willing to leap to his death. In the image
itself, however, the only position the frog actually inhabits is the one in which Heartfield
has suspended him, hovering between the two spheres, directly above the threshold.
More than such new imagery, Heartfield’s pattern of self-appropriation in the
1950s and 1960s poses a challenge to modernist schemas that describe the postwar “neo”
avant-garde citing the “historical” avant-garde. Heartfield’s set designs in East Berlin, in

187
Martin Loiperdinger, “Film Censorship in Germany,” in Silencing Cinema: Film
Censorship Around the World, ed. Daniel Biltereyst and Roel Vande Winkel (New York
and Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 89-90.
188
“Komm zu uns nach den Westen,” / sagte die Schlange zum Frosch / “Hier herrscht
die Freiheit / Hier kann man sich maesten!” / Er hopste. / Sie sagte: “Ich bin so frei” / und
liess ihn sich schmecken.”
189
Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall (2008), 26-27.
83
particular, internalized this relationship to the past within himself. He began reworking
his own earlier compositions, subjecting them to the same cutting and pasting that he
formerly reserved for mass-produced, found images. One such stage design was a back-
projected globe with a spider web radiating out from Berlin (fig. 19). At the nucleus
Heartfield placed a spider with a swastika on its back, wearing Hitler’s signature hairstyle
and moustache. Heartfield used the image for several scenes in The Illegals (Die
Illegalen; Deutsches Theater, East Berlin, 1961), a play about the German underground
in World War II written by a former Brecht collaborator, Günther Weisenborn.
190
The
montage on which it is based was one Heartfield made in 1935 as the cover for Markus
Bernhardt’s anti-Nazi book, The Brown Net (Das braune Netz; fig. 20).
191
Heartfield
made only slight modifications, such the elimination of cartographic details and the
addition of barbed wire spikes along the web.
The Illegals is a work of “documentary theater,” a genre Piscator initiated in the
1920s, which became extremely popular in the 1960s when the fiercely repressed
atrocities of World War II belatedly came to light through international news outlets and
ongoing Nazi trials.
192
Documentary scripts were staged in cities across both Germanys,
providing serious examinations of the Nazi period and lingering traces of fascism, which
politicians had fought to repress for fifteen years. The Illegals is in a class with Rolf

190
Karl-Heinz Schoeps, Literature and Film in the Third Reich, Kathleen M. Dell’Orto,
trans. (Rochester, NY and Suffolk, UK: Camden House, 2004), 267.
191
Michael Tötenberg, John Heartfield: in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 87. Markus Bernhardt, Das braune Netz (Paris:
Éditions du Carrefour, 1935).
192
Piscator’s role in developing documentary theater on both sides of the Atlantic is
delineated in Gary Fisher Dawson, Documentary Theatre in the United States: An
Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Content, Form, and Stagecraft (Westport, CT and
London: Greenwood Press, 1999); and Tom Cantrell, Acting in Documentary Theatre
(Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
84
Hochhut’s play, The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter; 1963), which accused Pope Pius XII of
being implicit in the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish campaign. Piscator staged the world
premier of The Deputy at the Freie Volksbühne in West Berlin in 1963 and Heartfield
designed a poster for the Deutsches Theater’s East Berlin production of the play in 1966
(fig. 21).
193
Heartfield centered the Pope against a black background and oriented the text
around him at different angles, bringing his politically cynical visual language into focus
with a sobering depiction of recent history. Heinar Kipphardt’s play, Joel Brand: The
Story of a Business Transaction (Joel Brand: Die Geschichte eines Geschäfts; 1965),
depicted the failed Nazi attempt to trade one million Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz for
ten thousand trucks from the Allies. From Sweden, the playwright Peter Weiss became a
favorite of West German directors with his documentary plays. Weiss’ The Investigation:
Oratorio in 11 Cantos (Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen; 1965) offered a
staged account of the recent trials of Nazi officials in Germany, which the playwright
observed firsthand.
194
The play premiered simultaneously in twenty cities across both
Germanys in October 1965 to critical acclaim.
195
Weiss’ Vietnam-Discourse (Viet Nam
Diskurs; 1968) criticized both American foreign policy and also the form of documentary

193
Judith Beniston, “‘Unzulänglichkeit gegenüber der Geschichte’: Hochhuth’s Der
Stellvertreter and Weiss’s Die Ermittlung,” in Representing the German Nation: History
and Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Mary Fulbrook and Martin Swales
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 91.
194
These are referred to as the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (Auschwitz Prozess) or, more
specifically, the Second Auschwitz Trials (zweite Auschwitz Prozess), the first having
been held in Poland shortly after the war.
195
For statistics on the play’s premiere, see Anke Pinkert, Film and Memory in East
Germany (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 174. For
further notes, see Robert Cohen, Understanding Peter Weiss (Columbia, SC: University
of South Carolina Press, 1993), 83-97 and Gene A. Plunks, Holocaust Drama: The
Theater of Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 116.
85
theater itself (the rear stage wall bore the words “documentary theater is crap”).
196
Weiss
took advantage of his impunity as a socialist playwright outside of the Soviet Union in
his play Trotsky in Exile (1970), confronting Leon Trotsky’s assassination, which was
still a taboo subject throughout the Eastern Bloc.
197

As directors programmed moralizing works of classical antiquity alongside
Brecht’s fables and these documentaries of recent history, Heartfield’s recycling of
material from within his own oeuvre, took on a historical dimension. East German
Heartfield quoted Weimar-era Heartfield in an attempt to make images he had once
produced again signify democratic values. An earlier part of his oeuvre had become a set
of readymades even to himself, which could be appropriated and adapted to meet new
political demands. His role as “monteur” shifted from the montage of images to that of
historical periods. When his 1935 book cover for The Brown Net became a scrim for the
1961 stage production of The Illegals, slight adjustments marked the passage of time. His
images were resurfacing not in the triumphant defeat of totalitarian attitudes in Europe,
but amid a return to totalitarian attitudes in an atmosphere that made it too risky for him
to appropriate new images from the Soviet press. His iterative recycling of his own
imagery signified differently in the 1960s than it had in the 1930s, not necessarily
because of his masterful cutting and pasting, but because the historical conditions for
viewing these images had changed.

196
See Marvin Carlson, Theatre is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in
the Late Twentieth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 6.
197
For more on Weiss’ politics, these plays, and their international reception, see Robert
Cohen, Understanding Peter Weiss (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1993), 60-117; Anne Bourgignon, Der Schriftsteller Peter Weiss und Schweden (St.
Ingbert: Röhrig, 1997); and Olaf Berwald, An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss
(Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Camden House, 2003), 5-8.
86
One further example of Heartfield’s postwar citation and alteration of earlier
material is the photomontage Lenin over Moscow (fig. 22). Published in September 1931
as the cover of a special issue of the magazine USSR in Construction (SSSR na stroike)
dedicated to “Today’s Moscow,” the image superimposes a monumental shadow of Lenin
with an outstretched arm pointing his finger toward the edge of the image, where
Heartfield positioned the meeting of countryside and city, agrarian past and industrial
future.

The photomontage was re-used for the front page of the magazine, The Red Flag
(Die rote Fahne) in January 1932 with the headline, “Red Front of the Battle Year 1932:
Lenin Shows the Way to Socialism!” (Rot Front dem Kampfjahr 1932: Lenin zeigt den
Weg zum Sozialismus!; fig. 23).
198
The montage was also back-projected onto the stage
for Aleksei Popov’s 1932 production of Nikolai Pogodin’s My Friend (Moi drug), a play
about the opening of a new factory, staged at the Moscow Theatre of the Revolution (fig.
24).
199
Actors imitated Lenin’s gesture in the projected backdrop, creating parallels
between spectral and live bodies that were central to the political potential of electronic
media in proletarian and epic theater. This is what, for Piscator, was supposed to
demonstrate to audience members that they, too, could insert themselves into history.
In 1966, Heartfield returned to this photomontage for a performance of Lenin
Poem by the Volksbühne in East Berlin. For this stage version of a 1924 text that the
Soviet writer Vladimir Mayakowsky wrote on the occasion of Lenin’s death, Heartfield
re-adapted the montage for the program booklet as well as a stage projection. In the

198
Sabine Kriebel discusses these re-occurrences of the photomontage in Revolutionary
Beauty (2014), 111-21.
199
Laurence Senelick, Historical Dictionary of Russian Theater (Lanham, MD, Roronto,
and Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press, 2007), 228; and David Elliott, New Worlds:
Russian Art and Society, 1900-1935 (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 118.
87
program, Heartfield partially covered the image at the bottom with a red triangle bearing
the title and name of the theater (fig. 25). The stage projection retained Lenin’s imposing
silhouette but did away with the birds-eye view of Moscow (fig. 26). Rather than
swapping out Moscow for East Berlin, Heartfield erased any reference to what was being
“built” behind Lenin, leaving room to question his authoritative gesture. The production
was directed by Robert Trösch and dedicated to the SED on the twentieth anniversary of
its founding. Whereas Heartfield’s 1931 publication of the montage was loaded with
notions of constructing the future, the 1966 production was in every sense retrospective;
it looked back ideologically to Lenin, historically to the establishment of the SED, and
visually to Heartfield’s interwar work. In another scene, Heartfield also re-used an image
of Lenin from his 1951 film montage for The Mother (fig. 27). The criticality of
Heartfield’s decades-long, and now cannibalistic, montage practice emerges between his
layers of deconstruction and re-assembly, as he responded to changing ideological
conditions with media that inherently opened themselves to a range of political readings.
For the last decade of his life, Heartfield was an important figure in the East
Berlin art scene, taking on students and weighing in on official matters at the Academy of
Arts alongside Otto Nagel, Fritz Cremer, Max Lingner, and others.
200
Seen in terms of the
persistence of montage practice, the East Berlin context offers a an alternative model of
postwar appropriation art to those of New York, Cologne, or Paris, one that was engaged
in the politics of censorship, intermediality, and realism. The survival and renewed
contemporaneity of Heartfield’s avant-garde aesthetic from the interwar period, were
transmitted to postwar East Berlin despite the constantly shifting dictates of socialist

200
See Ulrike Goeschen, Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus:
Moderne in Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft der DDR (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001).
88
realism. In that context, Heartfield continued to be involved in the critical appropriation
of figurative imagery, although it was a slightly younger generation of East German
painters, rather than Heartfield, that critics and historians have discussed alongside
Western “neo-avant-garde” artists. Paul Jaskot recently wrote that the East German
painter Werner Tübke’s (1929-2004) overcrowded figurative canvases reflect an
ambivalence toward German history similar to that of Gerhard Richter’s paintings from
the mid-1960s.
201
When younger East German artist were belatedly included in West
German exhibitions such as documenta in the mid-1970s, and West German artists such
as Johannes Grützke and Karl Horst Hödicke reintroduced figurative idioms into their art,
critics did not take up Heartfield’s contemporaneity with regard to these developments.
Until roughly the mid-1970s, critical discourse in Cold War Europe, in general,
and in a divided Germany, in particular, unfolded in two separate sets of art journals and
exhibition venues. Heartfield’s postwar work was rarely considered as contributing to
dominant terms in Western art discourse such as détournement, Nouveau Réalisme, and
Pop art in the 1950s and 1960s, and appropriation, pastiche, and the “Pictures
Generation” in the 1970s and 1980s.
202
We can better understand the politics of the visual

201
Paul Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 67-74.
202
“The Pictures Generation” was an exhibition organized by Douglas Crimp at Artists
Space in New York in 1977, including work by Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie
Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith. Crimp’s concept of new-figurative art was re-
examined and expanded in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2009 exhibition, The
Pictures Generation: 1974-1984. For the allegorical reading of these practices, see Craig
Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Post-modernism,” October 12
(1980): 67-86; Buchloh 1982, 43-56; and Hal Foster, “Subversive Signs,” Art in America
(November 1982), reprinted in Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 99-117. In the 1990s and 2000s, “pirating” came to stand for
those strategies in a digital age but is outside the scope of this discussion. See Nicolas
Bourriaud, Postproduction [2001] (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002), 88.
89
trope of cutting and pasting in the postwar era in light of the medium- and ideology-
inclusive history that Heartfield’s capacious oeuvre demands.
The discursive divisions between prewar and postwar, East German and West
German, that obscure Heartfield’s appropriational aesthetic in the 1950s and 1960s, have
also depoliticized related visual modes of appropriation in the West. Klaus Honef and Uta
Grosenick, for instance, make it difficult to think of Heartfield as a contemporary of Pop
artists in the 1960s when they write, “anyone who sets out to find a historical point of
departure for Pop is bound to arrive at Dada or Duchamp.”
203
In the period of the 1960s
to which they refer, Duchamp and Dada artists were alive and active. They may have
been historical points of departure for the contemporary, but were also still
“contemporary” themselves. Heartfield nevertheless lived out the last two decades of his
life as a figure who could only be thought as a historical precedent for postwar art. In
order to imagine what a reversal of this bias might look like, it is necessary to question
the political significations of the terms “montage” and “socialist realism” in the 1950s
and 1960s. Only after seeing how the avant-garde strategy of montage informed the
development of socialist realism, does its critical potential—and imbrication with Pop art,
Nouveau Réalisme, and the Pictures Generation—become fully apparent.
Heartfield’s montages are important in being able to see over this ideological
divide because they present the possibility that socialist realism can be read as a bottom-
up form of resistance against a totalitarian visual regime. Devin Fore claims that the
affinity between photo-based montage practices and socialist realism provides an
important precursor for postwar appropriation art: “Socialist realism proceeds by

203
Klaus Honef and Uta Grosenick, eds., Pop Art (Cologne and London: Taschen, 2004),
15.
90
reframing its subject and transforming it into a higher-order representation, an image of
what existed before.”
204
As John Curley argues, Gerhard Richter provides an example of
how Heartfield’s montage strategy was a fundamental reference point for the ubiquitous
aesthetic of appropriation in Western European and North American art from the 1960s
to the 1980s: “I want to challenge the assumption that Western strategies of appropriation
and the ready-made were Richter’s only models. The artist would have first encountered
such strategies not in advanced Western artistic practice, but in socialist agitation…
Politically motivated photomontage (inspired by John Heartfield) [was] alive and well in
East Germany throughout the 1950s.”
205
Swiss curator Harald Szeemann wanted to
include a selection of socialist realist works in the documenta V exhibition in 1972
alongside photo-realist painting and images developed by advertising agencies.
206
The
socialist realist loans never came through, but Szeemann’s intention was known widely
enough to cause reconsiderations of the politics of figuration and politically didactic art
in the West. In 1984, the art historian Walter Grasskamp referred to Hans Haacke’s
politically critical art as the artist’s “own socialist realism,” using a title rarely applied to
artists in West Germany during this period.
207

204
Fore, Realism after Modernism (2012), 245. Leah Dickerman also supports a claim
that photography was a progenitor of socialist realism in “Camera Obscura: Socialist
Realism in the Shadow of Photography,” October 93 (Summer 2000): 140.
205
John Curley, “Gerhard Richter’s Cold War Vision,” in Gerhard Richter: Early Work
1951-1972, ed. Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent, and Jon Seydl (Los Angeles:
The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), 24.
206
Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The
Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art. Malden., MA and Oxford: John Wiley and
Sons, 2016), 35.
207
Walter Grasskamp, “An Unpublished Text for an Unpainted Picture,” October 30
(Fall 1984): 21.
91
Heartfield’s postwar productions, The Mother, The Illegals, and Lenin Poem,
offer a notion of realism in epic theater that presaged these West German appropriations
of the idiom by more than a decade, and they represent instances of collective authorship,
between Heartfield, Herzfelde, Brecht, Neher, and others, that anticipated the
postmodernist critique of authorship in the visual arts. These connections might have
been more apparent to critics had Heartfield stayed in London, where he would have
overlapped with the Independent Group in the 1950s, or returned to West Germany,
where his works might have been seen alongside Haacke, Richter, and Sigmar Polke.
Because the SED begrudgingly accepted Heartfield’s work as socialist realist, however,
historians of postwar art face a peculiar challenge when contending with the possibility of
his critique even as he worked within a visual idiom so ideologically micro-managed.
If originality is associated with artistic modernism—or, in certain discussions, the
historical avant-garde—and appropriation with artistic postmodernism—or the postwar
and neo-avant-garde—then Heartfield’s stage oeuvre offers a unique, and specifically
theatrical, notion of modernism, which already in the 1920s was involved in the practices
of image borrowing and remediation that would become hallmarks of postmodern art.
Across the twentieth century, theater practice was also based on the dispersal of
authorship, between various craftspeople, actors, producers, and stagehands. Theater
program booklets leave space to credit these many contributors in a way that gallery wall
labels do not. The theatrical model of shared authorship was yet another way in which
artistic postmodernism came to look like theatrical modernism. Fredric Jameson,
grappling with the distinction between modernism and postmodernism, argued in 1998,
“we do not have to be antiquarian or nostalgic to appreciate the ways in which Brecht is
92
still alive for us.”
208
Jameson traced the cultural and temporal survival of Brecht’s ideas
back to a much-discussed Berliner Ensemble tour to Paris in 1954, after which Brecht
gained a new following among West European artists.
209
For Jameson, this chance to see
Brecht outside the Soviet Bloc allowed artists and audiences of all stripes “to return to the
older pre-Stalinist combination of avant-garde art and politics.”
210
This positioned Brecht
as a central node of transference between the historical avant-garde and postwar artistic
traditions as various as montage, readymade, appropriation, détournement, and décollage.
The greatest debt West German theater and performance art in the postwar period
owe to Brecht relates to his insistence on incorporating the audience into the dramatic
action as active rather than passive observers. Directors who became known for their
participatory stagings often cited Brecht in this regard. Brecht’s set designers openly
displayed technical equipment such as light sources and curtain tracks rather than trying
to maintain a seamless illusion of reality on stage.
211
The practice of the Berliner
Ensemble in the 1950s was to keep the audience lights on at maximum brightness
throughout the performance with the apparatuses in plain sight.
212
West German theaters
used this tactic of audience inclusion, citing Brecht outright. Brecht’s choice metaphor
for the ideal experience of theatergoers was the boxing ring.
213
Postwar directors literally
staged productions in sports arenas, hired professional athletes, and trained actors in

208
Jameson, Brecht and Method (1998), 5.
209
Ibid., 17.
210
Ibid.
211
Philip Glahn, Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and American Art,
1967-79 (Diss. City University of New York, 2007), 5.
212
Richard Eldridge, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 511.
213
James K. Lyon and Hans-Peter Breuer, ed. Brecht Unbound (University of Delaware
Press, 1995), 51.
93
swordplay, but this ideal was more often achieved figuratively through arena or circular
formations that allowed spectators to see the action and each other in the absence of
curtains and a backstage.
For Piscator and Brecht in their respective Berlin theaters of the interwar and
postwar periods, the premium on involving the audience in some way, even if
intellectually, as opposed to physically, was one of the crucial tools they used to make
theater political. Some postwar West German critics and audiences reacted angrily to the
proposal that the theater-going experience should be an intellectual exercise rather than
mere entertainment or amusement. This became particularly divisive among audiences
during the postwar West German economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists
engaged by West German theaters were also political in their non-theatrical work, but the
art they presented on stages with directors trained in epic theater’s defamiliarization
devices necessarily revived older questions of class history, the politicization of the
audience, and the pedagogical role of art.
As the German artists and critics in the following chapters engaged with works by
artists from the United States, such as Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Allan
Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Paul Thek, and Edward Kienholz, it is worth pointing out that
even in the Weimar period, epic theater’s two main theorists—both of whom went into
exile in the United States—were already thinking about how their notion of a politically
engaged theater audience could account for American mass culture. With this in mind,
Piscator wrote in 1929, “this chapter of [interwar] German theater history should not be
without interest for American readers.”
214
Although this study as a whole focuses on a

214
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), viii.
94
specifically German trajectory of epic theater rippling across stages and art galleries, the
following examination of American Pop art on German stages shows how interwar
concerns over Americanization were transferred to a politically and visually unstable
Cold War alliance between West Germany and the United States.
95
Images to Chapter 1

FIG 1. George Grosz and John Heartfield, First International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920
FIG 2. George Grosz and John Heartfield, The Middle Class Philistine Heartfield Gone
Wild. Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture, 1920

96

FIG 3. Erwin Piscator and John Heartfield, Russia’s Day, Berlin, 1920

FIG 4. Erwin Piscator and John Heartfield, The Cripple, Berlin, 1920
97

FIG 5. Felix Gasbara and Erwin Piscator, composite of views from In Spite of
Everything!, Berlin, 1925
98

FIG 6-7. Erwin Piscator and Hübler Kahla, two scenes with live actors and back-
projected films from Tidal Wave, Berlin, 1920
99

FIG 8. Erwin Piscator and László Moholy-Nagy, composite of scenes from The Merchant
of Berlin, Berlin, 1929

100

FIG 9. John Heartfield, stage set for Mother Riba, East Berlin, 1955

FIG 10. Berliner Ensemble reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Dove, East Berlin, 1951

101

FIG 11. John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde, photographic projections for The
Mother, East Berlin, 1951

FIG 12-13. John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde, projections and film montage for The
Mother, East Berlin, 1951

102

FIG 14-15. John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde, projected film montage for The
Mother, East Berlin, 1951

FIG 16. John Heartfield, Call for Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons!, photomontage, 1955
FIG 17. John Heartfield, Make way for Peace!, photomontage, 1935
103

FIG 18. John Heartfield, The Freedom of the Beast of Prey, photomontage, 1959

FIG 19. John Heartfield, The Illegals, East Berlin, 1961
104

FIG 20. John Heartfield, The Brown Net, book jacket, 1935

FIG 21. John Heartfield, The Deputy, program booklet, 1965
105

FIG 22. John Heartfield, Lenin Over Moscow, USSR in Construction, 1931
FIG 23. John Heartfield, Lenin Over Moscow, The Red Flag, 1932

106

FIG 24. John Heartfield, stage projection for My Friend, Moscow, 1932

107

FIG 25. John Heartfield, Lenin Poem, program booklet, 1966

FIG 26. John Heartfield projection for Lenin Poem, East Berlin, 1966
108

FIG 27. John Heartfield, projection for Lenin Poem, East Berlin, 1966
109
Chapter 2
Stage “Commonism”: Pop Art at the Theater Bremen

Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think
alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under
government. It’s happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so
if it’s working without trying, why can’t it work without being Communist?
Andy Warhol, 1963
215

In the last chapter a reprise of Heartfield and Brecht’s interwar stage aesthetic in
1950s East Berlin offered a vocabulary with which to approach the politics of socialist
realism that dominated the state-controlled environment in which they were working.
Epic theater’s shared vocabulary of page and stage looks past appearance at a deeper
social commitment to the image as a vehicle for exciting audiences about their political
empowerment. As this chapter moves to discuss the Theater Bremen’s appropriation of
American Pop art in West Germany, we are once again not looking at formal similarities
between the American Pop canvas and the West German stage design, but rather the
parody in modes of production.

215
Gene Swenson interview with Andy Warhol, “What Is Pop Art?” Art News
(November 1963): 25. Regarding the term “commonism” in the chapter title, Caroline
Jones suggests that Warhol first proposed the it as an alternative to “Pop art” around 1962
but soon dropped the term. See chapter four, “Andy Warhol’s Factory, ‘Commonism,’
and the Business Art Business,” in Machine in the Studio: Constructing the American
Postwar Artist (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 204.
Gavin Butt reiterates Jones’ claim that Warhol’s “Commonism” suggested collaborative
practice but not an explicitly left-wing political agenda, in “How New York Queered the
Idea of Modern Art,” in Varieties of Modernism, ed. Paul Wood (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press and Milton Keynes: The Open University, 2004), 344.
Hal Foster obliquely suggests that Warhol’s use of the term registers Pop art’s dystopian
underside in The First Pop Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 250.
110
To offer an example by way of introduction, in 1964 the Bremen director, Peter
Zadek (1926-2009), modified Shakespeare’s Henry V for a new production titled Henry
the Hero (Held Henry). The production explicitly criticized the Nazi cult of heroes, but
also framed recent German history within a longer historical arc.
216
The action took place
against an array of portraits of rulers and political figures, from Attila the Hun, to
Elizabeth I, Frederick the Great, and Winston Churchill (fig. 1). The stage designer
Wilfried Minks (b. 1930) sourced the images from cigarette boxes, in which they were
included as collectible items, enlarging them and intensifying their colors. “These fifty
portraits,” Minks explained, “were not historical material but rather the colorful, flashy
cards that one finds in a pack of cigarettes.”
217
During the production, some of the faces
were switched out for those of Hitler, Stalin, the Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun
(who was then a NASA director), the religious leader and televangelist Billy Graham,
and contemporary icons such as Elvis Presley and soccer player Uwe Seeler. Stressing
the German content of the adaptation, Minks projected a film onto the rear stage wall of
Hitler’s troops marching into Paris.
Minks and Zadek considered these images “Pop” because they were mechanically
reproduced and either democratically distributed (in cigarette packs) or circulating in
mass media. In light of Minks’ appropriation of these images and his alterations of scale

216
See Emma Smith, “Introduction,” in King Henry V (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 65; Tom Hoenselaars, “Shooting the Hero: The Cinematic
Career of Henry V from Laurence Olivier to Philip Purser,” in World-Wide Shakespeares:
Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (London and New
York: Routledge, 2005), 85.
217
“Ferner waren diese fünfzig Porträts nicht etwa historisches Material, sondern bunte,
grelle Zigarettenbildchen, die mit in den Zigarettenschachteln lagen.” In Elisabeth
Plessen, ed., Peter Zadek und seine Bühnenbildner. Wilfried Minks, Götz Loepelmann,
Daniel Spoerri, Peter Pabst, Horst Sagert, Johannes Grützke, Rouben Ter-Arutunian,
Karl Kneidl, André Diot (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2012), 34.
111
and color, Zadek claimed, “the 1964 production of Held Henry could really be called
Pop-esque (poppig). It led to the pulling in of modern art to the theater.”
218
On stage,
however, the aesthetic does not match that of the artists they claimed to be looking to,
namely Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. Their
misprision of Pop art’s appearance was based on specific strategies of appropriation and
mechanical manipulation, while the formal similarities, such as bright colors and gridded
composition, are faint. Yet, as German theater critics with a cursory knowledge of
American Pop art noted in regards to the later productions in this chapter, Zadek and
Minks’ methods of appropriation maintained traces of the original artist, whether
compositional or iconographic. The critics who discussed these productions used
vocabulary that leave open the question of whether the stage designs in Bremen were
appropriations of pre-existing works or new ones altogether under the authorial
designation of Zadek and Minks. This ambiguity of authorship emerges as one of the
central motifs of the discourse their productions provoked, and is also a contribution that
collective theater production can make to the institutionalization of Pop art, which often
ascribes works carried out by many hands to a single artist.
In the above epigraph, the social conformity and predictability, Warhol
contended, with which subjects of robust capitalist economies are encouraged to consume
commodities, is a defining feature of communist societies as well. If Warhol were
exposed to Brecht, it would have been in the 1950s when Brecht was living in East

218
“Das führte dann direkt zum Comic-Bühnenbild der Räuber, 1966, indirekt aber auch
zu ganz vielen Dingen wie 1964 der Aufführung von Held Henry, die man wirklich als
‘poppig’ bezeichnen konnte. Es führte zum Hineinziehen von moderner Kunst in das
Theater.” Plessen 24. Originally published in Peter Zadek, My Way: eine Autobiographie
1926-1969 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2004), 342.
112
Germany and known internationally for his Marxist orientation.
219
This chapter turns to
three theater productions between 1965 and 1966 in Bremen that attempted to bring
Brechtian principles of staging together with images adapted from American Pop artists.
Indirectly, these productions offered a response to Warhol’s question of whether
“thinking alike” can “work” without being communist. Brechtian aesthetics encouraged
rational rather than emotional responses among the audience, but responses that were
nonetheless personal. At the Theater Bremen, Brechtian aesthetics became an antidote to
the “thinking alike” that Warhol identified, and this occurred in West Germany, “without
being Communist.”
The project of staging epic theater for audiences who were not as committed to
Piscator and Brecht’s agendas as those in the previous chapter became increasingly
untenable as the Cold War progressed. Piscator, for instance, resettled in 1951 in West
Berlin, where he led the Freie Volksbühne from 1962 until his death four years later,
avoiding financial and political constraints that Brecht and Heartfield faced in East
Berlin.
220
As epic theater’s socialist grounding slipped further away from West Germans’
daily experiences of economic abundance, Brecht’s hallmark visual cues, such as

219
Victor Bockris suggests Warhol was exposed to Brecht in the early 1950s while
designing programs for the Theater 12 Group in New York: “From an older member of
the group, Aaron Fine… Warhol was introduced to the ‘alienation effects of the German
playwright Bertolt Brecht, which Andy later acknowledged had helped him shape his
own aesthetic.” Victor Bockris, Warhol, The Biography (London: Da Capo Press, 2003),
110, reprinted in Philip Glahn’s Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and
American Art, 1967-79 (Diss. City University of New York, 2007), 21f49.
220
Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski (New
York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982), 160; William Grange, Historical
Dictionaries of Postwar German Literature (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2009),
229.
113
exposed lighting sources and rapidly alternating stage backdrops, became important
components of West German theater practice.
Pop art’s methods of sourcing and adapting popular, recognizable imagery came
together with epic theater in Bremen at precisely the moment in which the West German
market, dominated by industrialists, some of whom had Nazi pasts, turned to embrace
American Pop art while its university-generation protested the Americanization of
German culture and the United States’ international policy. The three productions in this
chapter have been selected for their explicit references to American Pop art. This was
uncommon in theater set design, which seldom assimilated works of contemporary art in
such direct ways, and unprecedented in West Germany, whose own artists were passed
over in favor of American ones.
The Bremen stage sets cited American artists about whom there was a lively
discourse in West German newspapers and magazines. I follow instances of visual
appropriation from Pop-art sources, to galleries, to the stage, and to the television, where
the productions were broadcast to reach at-home audiences across West Germany. The
stage set for The Un-advised (Die Unberatenen) in 1965 featured adaptations of works by
Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenburg, Spring’s Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen) in
1965 made use of Warholian celebrity portraiture, and The Robbers (Die Räuber) was
performed in 1966 before an enormous adaptation of a lithograph by Roy Lichtenstein.
Unexamined by art historians, these productions offer new insights into American Pop
art’s international reception and the blurring of authorship inherent in the works used.
Pop helps to clarify the obfuscation of authorship in Director’s Theater and vice versa
because in West German magazines, newspapers, and television, a cult of personality
114
developed around Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann, despite the
fact that their works most commonly referenced in West Germany adapted imagery by
other designers, illustrators, or photographers who the artists did not credit. The most
prominent figures in Director’s Theater claimed allegiance to Brecht and his model of
collective theater, yet in reviews of their productions, critics singled out the director, the
scenic artist, and perhaps some of the more famous actors. Despite the printed programs,
which often listed assistant stage artists, costume designers, technical crew, and other
collaborators, this Brechtian concept of expanded authorship did not actually result in
their names being mentioned publicly. When the labor of the illustrators whose imagery
Pop artists were appropriating was made anonymous, and when the labor of theater
craftspeople or the playwright himself, was replaced with the name of a famous director-
designer duo, an elaborate collective model of authorship underwent an ironic reversal.
The chapter will eventually marshal these instances of art and epic theater to
argue that on both stage and television, the simultaneous expansion and contraction of
authorship, which often completely overshadowed the playwright’s own contribution,
was even more pronounced in the theatrical format than in the fine art contexts in which
the works were circulating. The reading of American Pop art that the Theater Bremen
allows is not only theatrical but also de-nationalized, as these mechanisms of covering up
and re-assigning authorship resulted, in some cases, in German stage designers receiving
credit for compositions and methods of appropriation that they borrowed from an
American source. Pop art is a special case within histories of art and theater. West
German collectors certainly bought Minimalist and Conceptual art, but never with the
115
zeal or at a rate that matched the historic consumption of American Pop art.
221
For
American artists involved with Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Land Art, West
Germany was more of a context for exhibiting work on an international stage than setting
record auction prices and liquidating gallery storehouses.
222
Even more than Pop’s
divisive public reception and market success, though, it is a special case because a major
German theater engaged significantly with it as an artistic mode of production. Critics
referred to other German theater stages of the 1960s as minimalist or conceptual, but
those stages did not reference specific artists associated with those terms.
Even theater critics who seemed sure that they understood what it meant for
comic book and advertising imagery to enter a museum, felt disoriented by the doubling
of that gesture onto a stage wall. The theater’s appropriation of Pop art constituted not so
much an affront to “high culture” as a symptom of the way the cultural high-low merger
of Pop art had already become naturalized in museum galleries and mainstream German
magazines. While artists such as Simone Forti, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and others
contemporary with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, engaged in exercises that could
be called theatrical, the case studies in this chapter center on a theater house—and not an
art space—appropriating works by visual artists otherwise operating outside the theater

221
Renate Wiehager discusses this phenomenon, focusing on the Daimler art collection,
in Minimalismus in Deutschland: Die 1960er Jahre (Ostfildern: Hatja Cantz, 2012).
222
See Stefan Germer and Julia Bernard, “Beyond Painting and Sculpture: German-
American Exchange in the Visual Arts,” in Detlef Junker, ed., The United States and
Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1968-1990 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge
Press, 2004), 381.
116
institution. The result was not merely “theatricality” but theater as such, scripted and
performed before a subscription audience, within a venerable German tradition.
223

Many of the theater reviewers who discussed these productions posed the
question of who was actually “authoring” anything. The director Peter Zadek altered
plays and hired translators and dramaturges to convert novels into stage scripts. Designer
Wilfried Minks took similar liberties, enlarging, doubling, and changing details of works
of American Pop art. There is no evidence in Minks’ archive or the Theater Bremen’s
that the pair sought authorization from the Pop artists who had lifted their compositional
motifs from other designers, illustrators, and photographers.
224
Theater houses commonly
re-use and revive scripts as well as costumes, props, and stage sets. Theatrical production
places less value on the contribution of any single craftsperson than do art market, gallery
display methods, categories of attribution, and cataloging systems. Whereas monographic
exhibitions and museum labels have normalized Pop’s affront to authorship, the Bremen
productions help to restore the ambiguity of authorship in Pop art.
Based on extant sources, it seems doubtful that Wesselmann, Oldenburg, Warhol,
or Lichtenstein ever found out about these productions. Although the Estate of Roy

223
For references to how the production examples discussed in this chapter related to a
longer German cultural tradition, see John Guthrie, “Schiller’s Early Styles: Language
and Gesture in Die Räuber,” The Modern Language Review 94.2 (1999): 440. Schiller’s
essay, “The Theater Stage as Moral Institution,” was written in 1784 under the title, “Was
kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” and published in 1785 and 1802
as “Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet.”
224
The research into this legal question is ongoing, with outstanding inquiries to the
Warhol and Lichtenstein Foundations, but the 1960s were a less litigious time than the
2000s. According to Edward Peter Stringham, “By 2005 the Lichtenstein Foundation was
paying $5 million per year in liability insurance to deal with lawsuits. In 2011 the Warhol
Foundation had to spend $7 million defending itself in a single lawsuit.” See Private
Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 194.
117
Lichtenstein in 2010 unsuccessfully accused an artist of infringing on the copyright of
one of Lichtenstein’s works, there were few precedents for such cases in the 1960s.
225

Appropriation art would not become a widely recognized category of conceptual artistic
production—as opposed to re-production—until the late 1970s.
226
If there were a
precedent for the visual re-use that occurred in Bremen, it would be in the work of the
artist Elaine Sturtevant who was replicating works by her contemporaries, including
Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella, beginning around 1965.
The German critic Otto Schrag discussed Sturtevant’s first solo exhibition in New
York in his 1965 article “Pop-Un-Art” in West Germany’s major contemporary art
magazine, Das Kunstwerk. Tellingly, Schrag used the opportunity to discuss Pop art itself
rather than Sturtevant’s appropriation of Pop.
227
He described Sturtevant’s nearly
identical versions of paintings by Lichtenstein and Warhol, emphasizing the democratic
do-it-yourself potential of Pop: “So perhaps this evening was proof that Pop art is not
really a matter for the professionals, but rather an opportunity for all to engage with

225
Annie Zaleski, “Elsinore’s Proposed Album Cover Causes a Copyright Uproar,”
Riverfront Times (6 May 2010), online. See also Martha Buskirk, “Appropriation Under
the Gun,” Art in America 80 (1992): 37-40; Heather J. Meeker, “The Ineluctable
Modality of the Visible: Fair Use and Fine Arts in the Post-Modern Era,” University of
Miami Entertainment & Sports Law Review 10 (1993): 195-237; and Rosemary J.
Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the
Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
226
Early attempts to articulate this phenomenon include Susan Krane and Phyllis
Rosenzweig, Art at the Edge: Sherrie Levine (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988);
Gerard Marzorati, “Art in the (re)making,” Artnews 85 (May 1986): 90-99; William
Morrow, “Pastiche, Bricolage, and Appropriation: Post-Modernism and the Infringement
of Copyright,” Art Monthly 15 (October 1988): 26-28; Paula Marincola, Image
Scavengers: Photography (Pennsylvania: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1983); and
Klaus Ottmann, Sturtevant, 1987 (New York: Stux Gallery, 1987).
227
Otto Schrag, “Pop-Un-Art,” Das Kunstwerk 19.5-6 (Nov-Dec 1965): 89. See also
Martha Buskirk’s discussion of Sturtevant and this exhibition in The Contingent Object of
Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003/2005), 82-85.
118
something imaginative, even those without artistic training.”
228
This elision between Pop
art and the appropriation of it, and the question of whether either could be included in
historical categories of talent and aesthetics, led to confusion over the images Minks put
on stage. His scenic appropriations were recognized as “Pop” even by critics who had no
idea who Warhol or Lichtenstein were.
For the Bremen team, Pop was instrumental in trying to revive a Brechtian notion
of epic theater. The scenic artist, Minks, described his aesthetic at Bremen as, “a mix of
Pop art, a cool, ironic style of leading the drama, a bit reminiscent of Brecht.”
229
The
director, Zadek, also referenced Brecht in explaining the origins of his staging
strategies.
230
The epic theater subtext of these productions is more central to the theme of
appropriation than Minks’ comment would make it seem. Thinking back to Brecht’s
work with Heartfield in East Berlin in 1951, we recall that by appropriating texts and
images produced by others, Heartfield was not seeking credit for their work but rather
corralling them into a conceptual collective.
In Brecht’s theater, this collective also included the spectators. This was in part
the impetus behind critiques of authorship coterminous with the productions in this
chapter, which developed in France between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault in the

228
“Vielleicht also war dieser Abend ein Beweis dafür, dass Pop Art eigentlich nicht
Angelegenheit der Professionellen ist, sondern die Möglichkeit für alle, ohne
künstlerische Ausbildung etwas Phantasievolles zu schaffen.” This was Sturtevant’s first
solo exhibition, at Bianchini Gallery. See Otto Schrag, “Pop-Un-Art,” (1965): 89.
229
“Eine Mischung aus Pop Art, einer kühlen, ein bißchen an Brecht erinnernden Art von
Schauspielführung, ironisch.” See Elisabeth Plessen, Peter Zadek und seine
Bühnenbildner (2012), 25.
230
Ibid., 26.
119
1960s and 1970s, with precursors in Umberto Eco and Wolfgang Iser.
231
In the mid-
1960s, as German cultural producers were using art and literature to question hegemonic
political structures and authority figures, the theorist Wolfgang Iser came to prominence
at the University of Konstanz in southern Germany, where he championed a new
understanding of textual analysis according to which meaning is formed not by the author
but by the reading subject, as he or she constantly responds to the written word based on
an accumulation of personal associations. While Iser’s most widely read books on the
subject were not published until the 1970s, they represent a shift in German intellectual
discourse away from textual and authorial power during the period covered in this
chapter.
232

Brecht also took this collective approach to authorship as central to his
playwriting and dramaturgy, and the Theater Bremen put these concepts into dialogue
with Pop art’s mode of visual citation. Whereas stage design has historically served to
prop up or illustrate a plot, these Pop images drove the productions, attracting more press

231
Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in Umberto Eco: The Open Work,
trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989 [1962]). Eco’s “open
work” made some similar points as Jaroslav Serpan’s “Open Form” (“Offene Form”),
published in German in 1963, in Jürgen Claus, ed., Theorien zeitgenossischer Maler
(Rowohlt: Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1963), 96, and which the German art historian and
critic Max Imdahl cited in discussions of the “all-over” composition in Pollock, the
decorative in Victor Vasareley, and in Barnett Newman. Imdahl, “Overstepping Aesthetic
Limits in Visual Art: Four Aspects of the Problem,” in Richard E. Amacher and Victor
Lange, ed., New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays,
trans. David Henry Wilson, et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 292; and
Imdahl, “Barnett Newman. Who’s afraid of red, yellow an blue III” in Christine Pries,
Ed., Das Erhabene. Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Grössenwahn (Weinheim: VCH Acta
Humaniora, 1989), 233-52.
232
Among Iser’s books, the most popular and relevant here is Der Akt des Lesens:
Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (Munich: Fink, 1976), published in English as The Act of
Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978).
120
attention than dramaturgical factors such as speech and gesture. In museums and
galleries, Pop art was radical in its thematization of consumer objects and its transference
of imagery between popular and fine art media. On the West German stage, Pop images
signaled the annexation of a major cultural export from the United States in a context that
further reconfigured its themes of authorship and appropriation.

Germanizing American Pop Art

As the iron curtain descended on Germany in the late 1940s, the growing
influence of American culture on German youth produced anxiety in an older generation
that had defended German culture against Amerikanismus (Americanization) during the
Weimar and Nazi periods.
233
In the first half of the twentieth century, the importation of
jazz music, clothing styles, and Fordist production methods from the United States were
perceived as threats to artisanal manufacturing traditions and Kultur (high culture).
234
Insofar as those threats were real, they never disappeared after World War II but were
briefly recoded by the student generation in Western Europe as positive, for they were
linked to economic recovery and global democracy.
235

Given the American occupation of West Germany following the defeat of the
Third Reich, during a tense standoff with the Soviet Union, the United States appeared

233
Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a
Divided Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).
234
Alexander Stephan, Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter
with American Culture After 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 13.
235
Rob Kroes, “American Mass Culture and European Youth Culture,” in Between Marx
and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-80, ed. Axel
Schildt and Detlef Siegried (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 82-108.
121
both anti-fascist and anti-communist, until roughly the mid-1960s, when the Vietnam
War began receiving publicity in the German press. Leading up to the Europe-wide
revolts in 1968, a politicized youth culture came to question a rosier picture of the United
States and its war on communism.
236
German perceptions of the United States were also
affected by the awareness, from the mid 1960s, that many big-business politicians in
West Germany had storied Nazi pasts, and the view therefore of the social market
economy, underwritten by American money, as a continuation of fascism.
237

Despite the constantly wavering reputation of the United States in West Germany
throughout the Cold War, Germans were among the most avid and steadfast consumers of
American Pop art, regularly outbidding collectors in New York auction houses. Through
the mid-1960, this market trend was consistent with the anti-authoritarian New Left,
which initially understood Pop as an attempt to move past the elitism of abstraction
toward a more accessible and democratic form of art.
238
German studies scholar Andreas
Huyssen remembered that still in 1968, “I, like many others, believed that Pop art could
be the beginning of a far reaching democratization of art and art appreciation.”
239
Arthur
Danto, among others, argued that this sentiment stemmed from a fatigue caused by the

236
See “The Rise of Anti-Americanism” in Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, America
Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (New York: Henry
Hoyt, 2006), 22-40.
237
Harm G. Schröter, Americanization of the European Economy (Dordrecht, The
Netherlands, 2005), 56.
238
See Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (New York: Praeger, 1970); and Andy Warhol: A
Picture Show by the Artist (New York: Rizzoli, 1987).
239
Andreas Huyssen, “The Cultural Politics of Pop: Reception and Critique of US Pop
Art in the Federal Republic of Germany,” New German Critique 4 (1975): 78.
122
elitism of tachism/informel and abstract expressionism: “Pop seemed politically
important in Germany because it seemed to repudiate abstraction.”
240

A general West German embrace of American Pop art fractured around 1966, as
the New Left social groups came to question the governmental and institutional structures
that brought Pop from the United States to West Germany. The prolific German critic,
Bazon Brock, condemned the United States’ military and aligned the ground war in
Vietnam with American capitalist culture and Pop’s sensationalizing of news media
images.
241
A later German scholar, Gerd Gmünden, commented that around this time,
“The democratization of art that many German Leftists saw promised by Warhol,
Lichtenstein, and others never materialized, as Pop art was easily assimilated by
consumer culture.”
242
In 1970 Das Kunstwerk published the article, “Pop Art or, How
Dead Must an Art be in Order to Become Art History?” which came to terms with the
possibility that Pop might already be a historical phenomenon less than a decade after its
arrival in Germany given the rapidity with which it was collected, written about, and
absorbed into narratives of postwar art.
243

American Pop art also arrived in West Germany at just the right moment to
become the most irresistible commodity on the art market. Sparked by the Marshall Plan
and currency reform, the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) refers to a period of

240
Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009),
xii.
241
Bazon Brock, “Die 60er Jahre – Haben wir gelebt?” in Bazon Brock: Ästhetik gegen
erzwungene Unmittelbarkeit. Die Gottsucherbande, Schriften 1978-1986 (Cologne:
DuMont Buchverlag, 1986), 241.
242
Gerd Gemünden, “The Depth of the Surface, or, What Rolf Dieter Brinkmann Learned
from Andy Warhol,” The German Quarterly 68.3 (1995): 238.
243
Peter Sager, “Pop Art oder wie tot mußt eine Kunst sein, um Kunstgeschichte zu
werden?” Das Kunstwerk 23.9-10 (Jun-Jul 1970): 37-38.
123
economic growth in West Germany beginning as early as 1950.
244
The economic co-
dependency of the United States and Germany was established in 1925 with the Dawes
Plan, which was intended to assist Germany in paying reparations from World War I.
Catherine Dossin has noted that while West Germans were prospering, the American
economy experienced a crisis in 1962, which drove American art collectors to withdraw
from purchasing art by thirty to forty percent.
245
There was also somewhat of a vacuum
of modern art within Germany, as many of Germany’s major modern artists remained in
their places of exile.
246
It was not only by default, however, that West Germany became
the most competitive market for American Pop art. As Stefan Germer has argued,
accepting all things American derived from a psychological need to acknowledge guilt
for crimes committed during World War II and identify with the victor.
247
In the 1960s,
viewing, buying, and discussing Pop art allowed West Germans to ally themselves with
the United States as opposed to the Eastern Bloc.
American Pop art first arrived in Europe through the dealer Ileana Sonnabend,
who opened a gallery in Paris in 1962. Sonnabend represented Pop artists from the

244
See Mark E. Spicka, Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and
Politics in West Germany, 1949-1957 (New York and Oxford, Berg: 2007) and Andrew
S. Weiner, “Memory under Reconstruction: Politics and Event in ‘Wirtschaftswunder’
West Germany,” Grey Room 37 (Fall 2009): 94-124.
245
See Catherine Dossin, “Pop begeistert: American Pop Art and the German People,”
American Art 25.3 (2011): 102.
246
See Stephanie Barron, et al., Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from
Hitler (Los Angeles: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1997); Keith Holz, Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London:
Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 2004).
247
Stefan Germer, “Intersecting Visions, Shifting Perspectives: An Overview of German-
American Artistic Relations,” in The Froehlich Foundation: German and American Art
from Beuys to Warhol, ed. Monique Beudert (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1966),
10.
124
United States through an exchange with Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, owned by her
ex-husband.
248
Along with Sonnabend’s promotion of American Pop art in Europe, there
was an outpouring of institutional support. The popular West German magazine Der
Spiegel published a review of the 1964 Venice Biennale (Biennale di Venezia), noting the
neon lights, pin-up girls, and overall Pop aesthetic of the American contribution: “Within
this Op- and Pop panopticon, the German contribution appears cool and objective.”
249

Bright and playful works by Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, and Robert Indiana dominated
the exhibition documenta IV in 1968, referred to as “the Pop documenta.”
250

The increasing affordability of plane travel in the mid-1960s, as well as the
presence of American artists and dealers at international art fairs in Europe, allowed
Germans to begin buying directly from artists and galleries in New York. In 1968,
German entrepreneur Karl Ströher bought the entire collection of Leon Kraushar, a major
Pop collector in the United States. Under the title Sammlung 1968 Karl Ströher, the
collection traveled to Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Bern, and Darmstadt, where it was
housed at the Hessischen Landesmuseum. Peter Ludwig amassed another world-class
collection of Pop art and displayed it at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. The
West German dealer Rudolf Zwirner claimed, “Most pop exhibitions would be
incomplete without certain works of [Peter] Ludwig.”
251
Ludwig, who wrote a doctoral
dissertation on Picasso’s use of the human figure, wanted to “revise” the history of art to

248
Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2010), 325-31.
249
“In diesem Op-und Pop-Panoptikum ist der deutsche Beitrag betont kühl und
sachlich.” Der Spiegel 27.20 (27 Jun 1966): 100.
250
Huyssen 1975, 78.
251
David Shirley, “American Pop Really Turns on German Art-Lovers,” New York Times
(27 Nov 1970), 46.
125
make it more “accessible” by increasing the presence of figurative works.
252
As private
collections of American Pop traveled around West Germany and entered museum
collections, art historians accommodated Pop within the canon of modern art.
253

The bifurcated reception of American Pop art among West Germans in the mid-
1960s was split between two equally enthusiastic supporters of the style: young leftists
and radicals on one side and wealthy industrialists on the other. The former considered
Pop to be the visual recognition of their conflicted experiences consuming the objects of
capitalism and the latter considered it a tribute to their experiences profiting from the
production of those objects. As Huyssen recalled, in the early to mid-1960s, “Pop became
the synonym for the new life style of the younger generation, a life style which rebelled
against authority and sought liberation from the norms of existing society.”
254
Benjamin
Buchloh reasoned that the wealthy German industrialists who avidly collected Pop art
“recognize their identity as well in Warhol’s work and perceive that identity as culturally
legitimized.”
255

That Germany’s conflicted reception of American Pop has not previously
received much scholarly attention does not mean that critics failed to notice it at the time.
Taking stock of this situation in 1970, the critic Phyllis Tuchman published the article,
“American Art in Germany: The History of a Phenomenon,” in Artforum, reasoning, “No

252
“Zur Eröffnung des Wallraf-Richartz-Museum/Museum Ludwig Köln” in Bazon
Brock: Ästhetik gegen erzwungene Unmittelbarkeit, Schriften 1978-1986 (Cologne:
DuMont Buchverlag, 1986) 473.
253
Benjamin Buchloh, for example, argued that, “The ambition to make Warhol an all-
American pop artist belittles his historical scope,” and that Warhol should rather be
understood in terms of a European lineage, including Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis
Picabia. “Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966” in Annette Michelson, Ed., Andy
Warhol (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2001), 36.
254
Huyssen 1975, 77.
255
Buchloh 2001, 36.
126
one can ever seriously study Warhol or Lichtenstein without visiting both Cologne and
Darmstadt. And the two [Ströher and Ludwig] collections combined contribute
immeasurably to a portrayal of Pop in general.”
256
Tuchman’s article was accompanied
by a full-page spread featuring two-dozen paintings by Lichtenstein in German
collections. She emphasized that German collectors were so eager to acquire American
Pop art that much of it was not even seen in the United States before being shipped to
Germany. In the same month, David Shirley published the article, “American Pop Really
Turns on German Art Lovers,” in The New York Times, reporting that Rudolf Zwirner
paid $75,000 for Lichtenstein’s Big Painting No. 6, breaking all auction records for the
work of a living American artist. Shirley argued that the international market value and
popular success of American Pop was linked to Germany’s investment in it.
257

American curators and critics did not shy away from using imperialistic rhetoric
to boast of how eager the German market was for American Pop. Ignoring Pop’s early
history in Britain and its practitioners in France, Germany, and Italy, Henry Geldzahler, a
curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote in 1963 that Pop is “even exportable to
Europe, for we have carefully prepared and reconstructed Europe in our own image since
1945.”
258
Geldzahler proudly claimed that American Pop was “comprehensible abroad”

256
Phyllis Tuchman, “American Art in Germany: The History of a Phenomenon,”
Artforum (Nov 1970): 60.
257
Shirley 1970, 46.
258
Henry Geldzahler, “A Symposium on Pop Art,” ed. Peter Selz, Arts Magazine (April
1963): 18. Historians Mary Nolan and Victoria de Grazia have partially confirmed
Geldzahler’s American-hegemonic view of postwar history, arguing that twentieth-
century European economies were modeled after the United States. See Mary Nolan,
Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s
Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006).
127
but perhaps did not anticipate how variously it would be comprehended. Warhol, for
example, wanted his first exhibition at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris to include only
his series of car crashes, race riots, and electric chairs, and to be called “Death in
America,” which would have positioned him as a political artist.
259
Nevertheless, Pop’s
critical and market successes in West Germany were based on German perceptions of the
United States more than actual industrial practices or market patterns.
The transatlantic dynamic represented by the German enthusiasm for American
Pop in general, and by the Theater Bremen’s appropriation of it in particular, is not an
active-passive relationship in which America produced and Germany consumed. One of
the United States’ most powerful weapons for fighting communism in these years was the
exportation of culture.
260
The unintended consequence was a loss of proprietary rights to
its cultural exports. The sale of American Pop art in Germany offered short-term gains
for American dealers and diplomatic advantages for the United States, but even Leo
Castelli, who benefited financially, bemoaned the fact that American buyers had not
acted as swiftly as Germans. Extensive, international monographic exhibitions on Warhol
and Lichtenstein since the 1960s have been joined in recent years by exhibitions such as
“Europop” at the Kunsthaus Zurich (2008), “Pop Art in Europa” at Museum het Volkhof,

259
Sonnabend changed the title to “Andy Warhol” but allowed him to exhibit his death
and disaster series. This European introduction to Warhol’s dark and explicitly political
works was in contrast, as Thomas Crow has argued, to an Americans reception which
initially saw Warhol as evasive. Thomas Crow, “The Absconded Subject of Pop,” RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56 (Spring-Fall 2009): 5; and Danto 2009, xi.
260
See Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Jane de Hart
Matthews, “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” and David and Cecile Shapiro,
“Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting,” in Francis Frascina, ed.,
Pollock and After: The Critical Debate [1985], 2
nd
Ed. (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), 147-96; and Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The
CIA and the World of Arts and Letters [1999] (New York and London: The New Press,
2013), 213-34.
128
The Netherlands (2012), “German Pop” at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014), “Pop
Europe” in Wolverhampton (2014), “International Pop” at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis (2015), “The World Goes Pop,” at the Tate Modern in London (2015), and
“Swiss Pop Art” in Aarau (2017).
261
The German encounter with American Pop is one
episode of the globalization of American culture in the Cold War that continues to move
the discourse on Pop art further away from the United States. Lichtenstein believed that
American Pop was inherently universal, explaining in 1963 that, “The meaning of my
work is that it’s industrial, it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the
same way, soon, so it won’t be American; it will be universal.”
262
As the forces of global
capitalism turn on their creators, Pop becomes increasingly less American and more
international. The double phenomenon of Americans promoting Pop abroad and German
collectors eagerly buying it, presents an early step in this globalization of Pop.
West German critics’ proximity to the Iron Curtain and their country’s politically
conflicting legacies of figuration—as the only licit artistic idiom during the Third Reich

261
Major international Warhol retrospectives since the 1960s include those at the Neue
Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1969), the Kunsthaus Zurich (1978), the Museum of Modern
Art in New York (1989), and the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco (2003). Notable
retrospectives on Lichtenstein include those organized by the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam (1967), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on New York (1969), and the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (1994). Recent texts and exhibitions that
account for Pop art outside England and the United States include W. Guadaginini and L.
M. Barbero, eds., Pop Art Italia 1958-1968 (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2005); Tobia
Bezzola and Franziska Lentzsch, eds., Europop (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zürich, 2008); “Pop
Art in Europa,” Musuem het Volkhof, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 8 Sept 2012 – 6 Jan
2013; Martina Weinhart and Max Hollein, German Pop (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle
Frankfurt and Cologne: Walther König, 2014); “POP EUROPE!” Wolverhampton Art
Gallery, United Kingdom, 5 July 2014 – 7 Feb 2015; “International Pop,” Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 11 – August 29, 2015; “The World Goes Pop,”
Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, 17 Sept 2015 – 24 Jan 2016; and “Swiss Pop
Art,” at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland, opening in May 2017.
262
Quoted in Stephen Bann, “Pop Art and Genre,” New Literary History 24.1 (Winter
1993): 118.
129
and then again in East Germany, and because of these associations a radical provocation
during certain moments in West Germany—led them to make pronouncements absent
from the American discourse on Pop.
263
German art critics wrote about Pop as reviving a
socially engaged Dadaist critique of bourgeois culture that had not been seen since the
interwar years. A prime example is the 1964 Der Spiegel article, “Pop Art: Soup for the
People,” which reproduced and discussed works by Lichtenstein and Warhol, George
Segal, and Wesselmann.
264
It reported to a readership extending far beyond museum
audiences: “This year, the new wave has finally rolled across the Atlantic and this Dada
throwback is surging through Europe. America’s Pop art, combined with the ‘New
Realism’ of all countries, has been shown in Amsterdam, The Hague, in Stockholm, and
in Denmark; it popped in Vienna and will soon pop in Berlin as well. The new Pop-
Realists were at documenta in Kassel and were represented at the Biennale in Venice.”
265
This wide range of realisms and readymades, from British and American Pop art to
French Nouveau Réalisme, German Capitalist Realism, and assemblage were among the

263
Hallmarks of that literature are Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) and The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and
Design, 1930-1995 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Michael Lobel, Image
Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002); and Foster, The First Pop Age (2014).
264
“Pop Art: Suppe fürs Volk,” Der Spiegel 46 (1964): 136-143.
265
“In diesem Jahre schliesslich ist die neue Kunstwelle über den Atlantik gerollt and
brandet nun al seine Art Dada-Rollback durch Europa. Amerikas Pop-Kunst, mit dem
‘neuen-Realismus’ aller Länder vereinigt, wurde in Amsterdam und Den Haag, in
Stockholm und im dänischen Flecken Humlebaek gezeigt, sie popte in Wien und wird
demnächst auch in Berlin popen. Die neuen Pop-Realisten waren auf der Kasseler
‘documenta’ und sie waren auf venezianiaschen ‘Biennale’ vertreten.” See “Pop Art:
Suppe fürs Volk,” Der Spiegel 46 (1964): 138.
130
first widely circulated figurative works in Germany since the Third Reich.
266
In the
German language, critics elided “Pop art” and “Nouveau Réalisme,” using terms such as
“new realism” (neue Realismus), or “Pop-Realists” (Pop-Realisten) to distinguish realism
in Western Europe and the United States as more critical than the realist idioms of the
Third Reich and East Germany.
267

Pop was novel in the West German context for being based in figurative images
yet appearing—for some audiences, at least—less ideological than realist Nazi art and
less didactic than Soviet-style socialist realism. Some West German critics denounced
socialist realism from the Soviet Union outright, while voicing the need for a critical
mode of figuration. In 1967, for instance, Leopold Zahn reviewed an exhibition of
Fernand Léger in West Germany, concluding with the anti-communist jab, “if the
aesthetic ideologues of Russian communism had been well advised, they would have
chosen the figurative images of Léger, this proletarian mythology, as the basis of their
social realism.”
268
Pop art appeared to respond to this need for a realist idiom in post-
fascist West Germany that was not Soviet-socialist realism and that also registered within
more conservative understandings of artistic media than Arman’s assemblages or Wolf
Vostell’s conceptual décollage Happenings, art, in other words that seemed to re-present

266
For more on the historical precedents and development of these terms, see Alex Potts,
Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar
European and American Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013).
267
Pierre Restany, “Die Beseelung des Objektes,” Das Kunstwerk 15.1-2 (Jul/Aug 1961):
40; and Fritz Neugass, “Roy Lichtenstein,” Das Kunstwerk 23.1-2 (Oct-Nov 1969): 78.
268
“Wenn die ästhetischen Dogmatiker des russischen Kommunismus gut beraten
gewesen wären, hätten sie die Figurenbilder Légers, diese proletarischen Mythologien zur
Grundlage ihres sozialistischen Realismus erkürt.” See Leopold Zahn, “Fernand Léger,
Kunsthalle Baden-Baden,” Das Kunstwerk 20.11-12 (Aug-Sept 1967): 68.
131
and interpret quotidian and figurative imagery, rather than merely place it in a frame or
on a pedestal as a found object that had been re-named art.
Another channel through which discussions of American Pop reached Germany in
the early 1960s was the translation of “American” criticism by Lil Picard and Peter Selz,
both originally from Germany. Das Kunstwerk, for instance, ran a series of “reports from
New York” by Picard. Beginning in the late 1960s, there was also scholarly attention on
American Pop, as German universities in Bochum and Hamburg began to accept the
study of the contemporary as a bona fide subfield of art history.
269
German texts from
1964-1965 by Werner Hofmann and Rolf-Gunter Dienst blurred the line between the
Fluxus and Nouveau Réaliste assemblages of commercial objects and Pop’s
representations of those objects.
270
An extensive anthology edited by Vostell in 1965
brought together Happenings, Fluxus, Pop art, and Nouveau Réalisme.
271
Vostell
included a German translation of the proceedings from a 1962 symposium on Pop art at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York with contributions by Peter Selz, Henry
Geldzahler, and Hilton Kramer. All of them voiced reluctance to applying the term
“realism” to something they were trying to brand as American. As Alex Potts describes,
“in the period immediately after the Second World War, there was a particularly strong
impetus for realist art with radical experimental aspirations to seek abstracting

269
For a brief overview of the development of the academic field of contemporary art,
which formed slowly between 1960 and 1980 in West Germany, see Claudia Mesch and
Viola Michely’s introduction to Joseph Beuys: The Reader (London and New York: I.B.
Tauris, 2007), 6-8.
270
See Werner Hofmann, Neue Realisten und Pop Art (Berlin: Akademie der Künste,
1964) and Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Pop Art: Eine kritische Information (Wiesbaden: Limes
Verlag, 1965).
271
Jürgen Becker and Wolf Vostell, eds., Happenings: Fluxus, Pop Art, Noueau
Réalisme: Eine Dokumentation (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1965).
132
alternatives to traditional forms of pictorial representation.”
272
This was particularly so in
the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States, when Pollock’s abstraction became a
widely accepted symbol of democracy, if not a justification for the cultural Cold War.
Lucy Lippard’s anthology, Pop Art (1966) reached German audiences through a
1968 translation.
273
Her chapter on Pop in Europe foreclosed the possibility of a German
Pop art: “Germany, with …its ultra-modern industrial society would seem an ideal
breeding ground, has produced little Pop Art.”
274
Lippard claimed that Konrad Lueg and
Gerhard Richter’s 1963 Demonstration for Capitalist Realism “can really be called Pop,
if not very original Pop,” which “would seem to be appealing to the Teutonic mind,”
never gained momentum in Germany.
275
When Richter and his colleagues ventured to
Paris in 1963 and introduced themselves to Sonnabend as “German Pop artists,” however,
she turned them away, preferring to keep her stable primarily American.
276
Richter and
Sigmar Polke were born in the last years of the Third Reich and later experienced the
SED (Socialist Unity Party) dictatorship in East Germany. The “popular” items they
referenced, portraits of Karl Marx and concentration camp watchtowers, were apparently

272
Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism (2013), 29.
273
Lucy Lippard, Pop Art (New York: Praeger, 1966) and (Munich and Zurich:
Droemer/Knaur, 1968).
274
Lippard 173.
275
Lippard even broadened the claim to: “There is no hard-core Pop Art in Europe,” and
“Pop Art in particular seems to be the product of an affluent, even Anglo-Saxon,
society.” Lippard 192-3. Christine Mehring discusses the problem of referring to German
“capitalist realist” artists as “Pop” artists in “The Art of a Miracle: Towards a History of
German Pop, 1955-1972,” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, Stephanie
Barron and Sabine Eckmann, eds. (New York: Abrams; Los Angeles: Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 2009) 152-69.
276
Gerhard Richter, “Interview mit Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Gerhard Richter,
The Daily Practice of Painting, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist (London and Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1995), 137; also mentioned in Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes:
Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 61
133
not suitable to be displayed alongside Brillo boxes, romance comics, or even Warhol’s
death and disaster series. The German Capitalist Realists thematization of the popular
referred to icons that not only circulated in the mass media, but also referred to the Nazi
past. They blurred the ubiquity of symbols of oppression with that of symbols of
consumerist pleasure and lighthearted entertainment. While Warhol did this in some of
his works as well, it was perhaps his celebrity persona and inherent connection to
American popular culture that the German artists simply could not imitate.
Between 1968 and 1970, while writing a doctoral dissertation at the University of
Hamburg, the German art historian Rainer Crone wrote the first catalogue raisonné of
Warhol’s paintings, films, and works on paper in close collaboration with the artist.
Crone is an important figure for understanding the West German reception of Pop at the
point of the 1968 revolts. For Crone, Warhol’s method of silk screening was tied to a
critique of mechanical reproduction and a Duchampian notion of appropriation. Crone
later wrote, “this use of multiple silk screens began in 1962 with the silk screen painting
Baseball and continued into 1965; it demonstrated Warhol’s mechanical process, in
which the artist’s hand was removed from the execution of the work. This approach can
be read as Warhol’s understanding of Duchamp’s way and method of presenting art
works.”
277
The West German reception of Duchamp will figure into the fourth chapter,
but for now it is important to highlight that Pop’s mechanical reproduction and
appropriation of images could be read as subversive affronts to the art market and to
consumer culture through Duchamp’s example.

277
Rainer Crone, “What Andy Warhol Really Did,” New York Review of Books (online;
20 Feb 2010). Hatje Cantz Stuttgart published Crone’s Andy Warhol (1970) in German.
134
What readings of American Pop art in West Germany had in common was a
fascination with image appropriation. For some critics, it was exciting that art reflected
the recuperating economy, for others, it was exciting that it represented anything
recognizable at all. Some collectors emptied out its politics and others read it as a radical
critique of the homogenizing effects of capitalism. Certainly those who understood it as
an intellectual exercise did so based on its abundance of irony. In all these cases, though,
Pop in the mid-1960s, was enticing and even controversial because of the conceptual
space it shared with mass media and mechanical reproduction. The silkscreening and
editioning of prints was a seemingly innocuous, if not subversive, way to employ the
potential of mass media, offering German audiences a chance to re-engage with the
concept of mass simultaneous reception free of the Nazi past and in a democratic context.
As Pop art filled galleries across West Germany, German critics and historians found
themselves contending with media far outside their training and undertaking rigorous
visual and social analyses of artistic forms low and high, from comic books and
television characters to theater and opera.
278

Transatlantic Realisms

Minks and Zadek identified in American Pop art the co-existence of realism and
abstraction, which they developed into a dramaturgical and visual style of stage
production. For dramaturgy, this meant the exaggerated gestures and unexpected pauses

278
Warhol held a subscription to the Metropolitan Opera in the 1950s while also enjoying
a subscription to Photoplay, a proto-tabloid magazine. See Richard Meyer, Outlaw
Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 125.
135
that had been centerpieces of Brecht’s stagings, and for the visual stage setting, this
meant figurative imagery that nonetheless transcended a particular location and became,
in Minks’ words, an “abstract” space. Zadek’s first encounter with the bold and
recognizable imagery of Pop art was transformative: “One day I saw paintings by Tom
Wesselmann… and then saw an exhibition of sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and
Lichtenstein’s comics… The large Brillo boxes, this strange combination between
advertising and art, reality and the comics… brought me into art.”
279
The aesthetic Zadek
and Minks developed at the Theater Bremen is referred to as the Bremer Stil (Bremen
Style), which is associated with bold backdrops and the inclusion of fine art on stage.
Along with theaters in Stuttgart, Cologne, and Berlin, Bremen was at the forefront of the
Director’s Theater movement. Theater historians have even called Bremen, “the most
radical theater in the country” for the period under investigation.
280
Although Bremen is a
small city in Northern Germany, its prestige as a theater city dates back to the eighteenth
century. In the 1960s it attracted prominent German directors, such as Hansgünther
Heyme, Peter Stein, Klaus Michael Grüber, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, along with
some of the most written-about stage actors in West Germany, including Bruno Ganz and
Edith Clever.
281
More than any of these figures, however, the Bremen Style is a term that

279
“Eines Tages sah ich Bilder von Tom Wesselmann… und sah eine Ausstellung -
Skulpturen von Oldenburg und Lichtensteins ‘Comics’… Die großen Brillo-Kisten, diese
komische Kombination zwischen Werbung und Kunst, Realität und Comic, das hat mich
zur Kunst gebracht.” Peter Zadek, My Way (2004), 342.
280
Oscar Brockett, Margaret Mitchell, and Linda Hardberger, Making the Scene: A
History of Stage Design and Technology in Europe and the United States (San Antonio,
TX: Tobin Theatre Arts Fund, 2010), 303.
281
William Grange, Historical Dictionary of German Theater (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2006), 51; Don Rubin, ed., The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre,
Vol. 1: Europe (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1994), 355.
136
developed around the productions by Zadek and Minks from 1962 to 1973.
282

Compounding the challenges that faced art critics in addressing the variety of media to
which Pop art made reference and the ambiguous political stances it seemed to take, the
historic changes in production practices associated with Director’s Theater were
additional challenges for theater critics sent to review productions in Bremen.
Zadek’s appeal to the audience by updating scripts to reflect contemporary
conditions was in line with the critiques of authorship alluded to earlier, which re-focused
attention from playwrights and actors onto audiences and readers. Zadek had escaped
Nazi Germany as a child with his Jewish parents, returning to West Germany after the
War, where he used the medium of theater to scrutinize, and in certain cases re-write,
works of classic German drama.
283
He staged canonical works by Goethe, Schiller, and

282
German-language studies of the Bremer Stil include: Peter Zadek, Das wilde Ufer: Ein
Theaterbuch, Laszlo Kornitzer, ed., (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1990); Klaus
Dermutz and Karin Messlinger, Die Aussenseiter-Welten des Peter Zadeks (St. Pölten:
Residenz, 2001); Franziska Hillmer, Peter Zadek und das Regietheater (Munich: GRIN
Verlag, 2003); Peter Zadek, My Way (2004); Klaus Dermutz, Peter Zadek: His Way
(Berlin: Henschel, 2006); Peter Zadek, Die heissen Jahre 1970-1980 (Cologne:
Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2006); Peter Zadek and Klaus Dermutz, Peter Zadek:
Gespräche mit Klaus Dermutz (Berlin: Alexander, 2007); Peter Zadek, Die Wanderjahre
1980-2009 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2010). The sole English-language study
of the Bremen Style is Richard Riddell’s dissertation from 1978, a valuable contribution
to theater history but not an attempt to explain the use of Pop art on stage. See Richard
Vernon Riddell, Wilfried Minks and the Bremer Stil: Study of a Contemporary German
Stage Designer (Diss. Dept. of Drama, Stanford University, 1978). See also Marvin
Carlson, Theater is More Beautiful than War: German Stage Directing in the Late
Twentieth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 26-45; Patrice Pavis,
“Wilson, Brook, Zadek: An Intercultural Encounter?” in Dennis Kennedy, ed., Foreign
Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993). Wilfried Minks was included in the substantial group exhibition accompanied by a
catalogue by Rolf Wedewer, Die neue Bühne (Leverkusen: Städtisches Museum Schloß
Morsbroich Leverkusen, 1967). Minks’ use of Pop art is also briefly discussed in Howard
Bay, Stage Design (New York: Drama Book Specialists/Publishers, 1974), 196-7.
283
Zadek left Germany in 1933 for England, where he studied theater and briefly worked
in television before returning to Germany.
137
Shakespeare with references to the rebellion of German youths, the Nazi past, abortion
rights, and the values of capitalism versus socialism. Minks considered the varieties of
naturalism practiced in German theater of the 1950s to be conservative and overly
cautious about broaching the Nazi past. He wanted to use the classical repertory to
address current issues as well: “The German postwar theater really got on Peter [Zadek’s]
nerves and mine too. Our aversion to sentimentality was extreme.”
284
Minks likened
compared his stage aesthetic to the exaggeration, visual force, and lack of sentimentality
he found in American Pop art.
285
Theater critics commented that the Pop-art productions
in Bremen intervened into traditions of theater by opening the scripts up for audience
interpretation and presenting uncertainty—in moral, textual, and visual form—as a
central feature of the theatergoing experience.
The blending of theatrical artifice and naturalism, of visual abstraction and
figuration, was crucial within the larger project of postwar German theater, of offering
audiences a way to fathom the Nazi past, and to incorporate it into cultural experience,
rather than separating out politics from entertainment. In addition to the classics, some of
the most popular plays in both Germanys during the Cold War were the historical
documentary dramas discussed in the previous chapter. Directors, designers, and
managers of major theaters made their views on current events known through interviews
in popular magazines as well as public discussions. If Zadek and Minks in 1960s West
Germany were less vulnerable to censorship than Brecht and Heartfield were in East
Berlin, they nevertheless developed a style whose politics some critics found ambiguous.

284
“Das deutsche Nachkriegstheater ging Peter ziemlich auf den Keks und mir auch.
Unsere Abneigung gegen Sentimentalität war extrem.” From an interview with Elisabeth
Plessen, 4 April 2011, in Plessen, Peter Zadek und seine Bühnenbildner (2012), 31.
285
Ibid., 25.
138
This stemmed from ambivalence in the politics of Pop art itself, about which art critics
were in wide disagreement. It came down to, as John Curley has written, “the Cold War’s
rigid artistic positions of abstraction and figuration.”
286
Curley shows that critics in the
United States, from Harold Rosenberg to Susan Sontag, wrote about Pop art as if it were
abstract, but that blindness to figuration was not possible in West Germany at a time
when realism was either hypercritical or retrograde. To represent the human figure in the
1960s in West Germany was a political act that either commented upon the 1950s taboo
on figuration, as a depleted category in art after the Third Reich, or seemed to uncritically
accept the underlying ideology of the state-mandated style of socialist realism across the
Berlin Wall, according to which art necessarily served a political agenda.
This problematic unfolded with particular traction on the theater stage, because
even abstract backdrops were going to be juxtaposed with the human figure of the actors.
In naturalistic stage design, the designer might represent a wooded forest by painting a
verdant backdrop and constructing fake trees. The original scripts used by the Theater
Bremen did in fact call for such naturalistic settings, including forests, castles, and school
rooms. Half a century before Zadek and Minks teamed up at the Theater Bremen,
Expressionist, Constructivist, Dada, and Bauhaus theater had overturned the notion that
the stage should visually link drama to the world of recognizable places and objects.
287

As Juliet Koss has observed, Bauhaus artists in the 1920s were making stage designs that
moved in the direction of “the demise of naturalism in the theater,” paralleled by moves

286
John Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of
the Cold War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 96.
287
Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet, ed., Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in
Scenography (New York: Routledge, 2010), 66.
139
by writers and visual artists.
288
The intervening Nazi ban on abstraction interrupted those
experiments. Theater historian Richard Riddell describes “the benign stylization of the
1950s” in German stage design, referring to a reversion to turn-of-the-century naturalism,
wherein objects and settings on stage served to bolster the scripted plot, not contradict it
or offer a visual alternative.
289

Zadek and Minks’ use of Pop art to create theatrical space was a major departure
not only from the naturalistic settings that the script called for, but also from postwar
European notions of how a scenic design functions in relation to narrative. Minks and
Zadek often confined the action to a narrow area toward the front of the stage, a
technique rooted in Brecht’s method.
290
Zadek and Minks directed the actors to
exaggerate their gestures, not only to conform to the conventions of melodrama but also
to those of comic-book imagery and Pop art. Zadek recalls, “[Minks] wanted that the
actors behave, move, and appear visually as comic-strip figures.”
291
The idea of

288
Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” The Art Bulletin 85.4 (Dec 2003):
729.
289
Richard Riddell, “The German ‘Raum,’” The Drama Review, 24.1 (Mar 1980): 40.
The minimalist approach of Wieland Wagner at Bayreuth beginning in 1951, which
upended seven decades of romantic-naturalistic sets with which Wagner’s operas had
become particularly associated, is one of the major exceptions to this “benign
stylization.” See Samuel Adams, “Blasting Wagner out of the Continuum of History:
Deutschtum Transposed in the Los Angeles Ring,” in Representations of German
Identity, Thomas Haakenson and Deborah Ascher Barnstone, ed., (Oxford: Peter Lang,
2013), 44.
290
Don Rubin elaborates, “There was another form of simplifying the set, as conceived
by Brecht and Neher, which became still another element in West German theatre in the
1960s. This involved the use of an empty playing area with a few symbolic but concrete
movable pieces of scenery, plainly visible lighting instruments and often descriptive signs
or projections. Wilfried Minks, the most influential set designer of this period, took up
aspects of didactic theatre in his formalized sets which were not, however, meant to fill or
symbolize anything but rather to assert the aesthetic of the set as its own justification.”
Don Rubin, The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre (1994), 389.
291
Plessen, Peter Zadek und seine Bühnenbildner (2012), 28.
140
defamiliarizing a gesture on stage by making it resemble those of the figures in comics
and Pop art has a direct precedent in epic theater. Brecht used film to record his
productions and rehearsals and arranged his stages and actors in ways that mimicked
photographic representation to achieve the effect of an obviously manipulated tableau in
order to evoke the mechanically reproduced pictorial representation one sees in
photographs and film. The point of such exercises was to demonstrate that the apparatus
did not control the body, but on the contrary, the body could ape machine-like gestures in
a way that would make the machine seem insignificant or disposable. As Devin Fore
explains, “the gestic actor imitates not a person, as traditional actors do, but a mechanical
reproduction.”
292

This defamiliarization is essentially melodramatic. Melodrama originated in
European literature at the end of the eighteenth century, denoting novels and plays that
entail emotional intensity, unforeseen endings, and bold or violent gestures on stage.
293
Upon melodrama’s inception, the French critic Julien Geoffroy wrote, “Everything is
exaggeration and caricature,” claiming the genre was a representation of poor taste.
294
In
1960s West Germany, the historically “low” genre of melodrama, along with comic
strips, advertisements, and folk-art, became sites of critical engagement. Minks and
Zadek’s directions for their actors to stilt their movements in order to look like figures in
Pop art, and Brecht’s re-organization of the stage to look like films of stages flaunted the
exaggeration and poor taste with which melodrama had historically been associated.

292
Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 160.
293
András Bálint Kovács, “Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and the Modern
Melodrama,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64.1 (Winter 2006): 138.
294
Quoted in Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 182.
141
Scholars of film, literature, and theater have employed the term melodrama more than art
historians, but in the Bremen productions, melodrama was a visual strategy as well;
actors seemed to imitate artworks, which in turn seemed to imitate the actors.
As German avant-garde filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder became
interested in melodrama, American Pop artists including Warhol and Lichtenstein were
recoding popular media as high art, and the Theater Bremen was re-purposing those
images as stage backdrops.
295
Comic books, in the 1960s especially, manifested the
heightened emotionalism and tension that distinguish the genre of melodrama, whether in
drama, film, or any other medium. Michael Lobel suggests that Lichtenstein’s choice of
melodramatic comic book sources was related to the contemporary resurgence of
melodrama in Hollywood films and that “the artist’s tendency to magnify and closely
crop his images could be connected to the extensive use of the close-up in filmic
melodrama.”
296
In the United States, the critical mobilization of lowbrow culture was
linked to a combination of influences, from countercultural politics to avant-garde art and
the corporate world. In West Germany, it was an attempt to move away from the rigid
hierarchical structure of a totalitarian past in which modernist forms such as jazz and
abstraction had been outlawed in favor of grand spectacles meant to ennoble the Aryan
type and control the masses. Despite this melodramatic correspondence between image
and gesture, Minks maintained that the theatrical backdrop should not offer a literal

295
For an account of the gender politics of melodrama in the postwar period, see Kym
Lanzetta, The Aesthetics of Sacrifice in Heiner Müller. Wolf Vostell, Anselm Kiefer, and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Diss. University of Chicago, 2008), 303-16.
296
Lobel, Image Duplicator (2002), 139. See also Foster, The First Pop Age (2014), 99
and Marla Prather and Dana Miler, An American Legacy: A Gift to New York (New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002), 64.
142
setting but rather hint at the characters’ emotional journeys.
297
Lichtenstein also
explained that he used images from popular sources to identify a mood, not to source a
specific story, that the comic book image “intends to depict and I intend to unify.”
298

Lichtenstein’s images nevertheless offer interrupted narratives, both of color and form,
and of lovers and combat soldiers. Minks’ use of both hand-painted backdrops and the
strategies of serial production employed by the Pop artists he was appropriating points to
the coupling of parody and antagonism that defined the Cold War alliance between the
United States and West Germany. The Pop images he selected for stage adaptation were
premised on these two conflicting notions; they parodied an existing composition while
superseding its maker’s authorship. Not only did Minks do the same, but like most set
designers, he was given credit for the labor of other painters and craftspeople.
The parody and antagonism inscribed into Minks’ backdrops also describe the
way West Germans balanced their economic and military dependence on the United
States with their will to establish a culture and an economy of their own. A 1966 feature
article from Der Spiegel testifies to the tendency in West Germany to measure oneself
against an American standard, stating, “1240 private jets are registered in Braunschweig
[West Germany], more than in any country, save for the USA,” and following up,
“…from January to August 1965 the Federal Republic [of Germany] was the second
largest exporter [in the world], following the USA.”
299
The German-American
competition for moral, economic, and cultural superiority inflected the way critics

297
Program booklet: Jürgen Fischer, ed. Spielzeit 1965-66 Theater der freien Hansestadt
Bremen, Vol. 9 (Bremen: B. C. Heye & Co., 1965) in ADK Franz Gauker Sammlung
Signatur 81 (PH 7A).
298
Gene Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Part I” (1963): 62.
299
Der Spiegel 1/2.20 (3 Jan 1966): 15, 20.
143
responded to the Bremen productions. One critic captured the problematic of whether
West Germans ought to admire, envy, or reject American culture, claiming that the stage
backdrop adapted a painting by “Rolf Lichtenstein.”
300
Though perhaps an innocent
mistake, the Germanizing of “Roy Lichtenstein” enabled the critic to sweep aside the
fundamental question that the Bremen Style raises, of how these scenic works came to
play the role of cultural, transatlantic mediator during the Cold War.

Tom Wesselmann and the “Image of the Federal Republic”

Although Zadek described the 1964 production of Henry the Hero as “really Pop-
esque” (wirklich… poppig), the first production for which Minks directly quoted images
from American Pop artists’ works was The Un-advised in 1965. Written originally as a
novel two years earlier, Thomas Valentin’s (1922-1980) The Un-advised is a work of
historical fiction about a class of high school seniors in West Germany who rebel against
their school’s administration. Scenes in the classroom, with students surreptitiously
passing notes and voicing opposition to the teachers, were juxtaposed with domestic
scenes in which the students attempted to engage their parents in discussions of taboo
subjects such as the Nazi past and East German politics. In both types of scenes the
teenage students were met with silence or evasive answers and grew disillusioned with
their elders’ complacency. The Un-advised thematized coming of age in a society of
morally questionable authority figures.

300
Herta Hansen-Beuss, “Stürmen und Drängen zwischen Applaus und Buh,” Bremer
Illustrierte No. 2 (nd): 33-35 in ADK Peter Zadek Archiv, Räuber 1966. Fritz Neugass
went further, claiming that Lichtenstein is German based on distant ancestry in “Roy
Lichtenstein,” Das Kunstwerk 23.1-2 (Oct-Nov 1969): 78.
144
The subject of the plays fits within Peter Brook’s authoritative account of
melodrama as a mode that, “regularly rehearses the effects of a menacing ‘primal scene,’
and the liberation from it, achieved through articulation and a final acting-out of
conflicts.”
301
The Un-advised commented on Germany’s contemporary situation and
recent past. The script indirectly responded to the popular 1933 pro-Nazi film about
Hitler Youth, Hitlerjunge Quex, while also presaging the student-led revolts that swept
across France and Western Europe in May 1968. Lived through the Second World War
and then teaching at schools in West Germany, Valentin used the script to explore
intergenerational conflict, the taboo against discussing the Nazi past, and the pressures of
being a teenager in a rapidly changing society.
302
A reviewer explained the production in
terms of the paradox of this moment in history by which, “The boys are stuffed with all
sorts of traditional slogans about manhood, and heroism, and citizenship, but they are
plainly misinformed about ‘the recent past’ (as Germany will diplomatically refer to the
Nazi reign of terror) and deliberately misled about, for example, 'conditions in the so-
called German Democratic Republic.”
303

By setting the narrative in an educational institution, Valentin exposed the way in
which the postwar generation’s authority figures—parents, teachers, and principals—
seemed unjustly to be beyond reproach. Equivalent figures in the eyes of the student
generation were lawmakers, judges, parents, police, and business leaders. The historical

301
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and
the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 54.
302
They key text on the “inability” to face the Nazi past is Die Unfahigkeit zu trauern:
Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens, (The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective
Behavior) by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich (Munich: Piper, 1991 [1967]).
303
Joshua Ossia Trilling, “German Play about Perplexed Schoolboys,” Times (22 Jan
1966) in ADK Franz Gauker Sammlung, Signatur 81 (PH 7A).
145
background against which Valentin wrote the novel included the trial of key Holocaust
architect Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and, those of twenty-two more surviving officers from
Auschwitz from 1963 to 1965, to which Peter Weiss’ 1965 play, The Ivestigation,
referred. Those who enforced duty, order, and tradition during the Nazi years were shown
to have also committed crimes against humanity.
304
As these trials proceeded, images
from the Holocaust flooded contemporary periodicals. The historian Habbo Knoch
describes how, “starting in 1955 a broad range of Holocaust images were gradually
disseminated in the German public realm… Newspapers and magazines intensified their
use of these images between 1960 and 1965.”
305
Ensuing feelings of guilt and repression
were not just a Nazi problem but a German problem, as many less conspicuous players
relived their complicity while the hearings unfolded. Among the generation that was born
at the end of the end of the war, the public response took the form of a politicized culture
that grew increasingly distrustful of the moral stances of its parents’ generation.
306
The
1960s movements in Germany, which brought particular issues concerning the Nazi past
and the complicity of the older generation, were also part of a broader international
movement that questioned authority figures and asserted freedom against social strictures
and market forces.
307

304
The best source of information on Eichmann’s trial remains Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963).
305
Habbo Knoch, “The Return of the Images: Photographs of Nazi Crimes and the West
German Public in the ‘Long 1960s,’” in Coping with the Nazi Past: West German
Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955-1975, ed. Philipp Gassert and Alan
E. Steinweis (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 36.
306
Arthur Marwick, “Youth Culture and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties,” in
Schildt and Siegfried, Between Marx and Coca-Cola (2006), 44.
307
See Barbara Heimannsberg and Christoph J. Schmidt, The Collective Silence: German
Identity and the Legacy of Shame, trans. Cynthia Oudejans Harris and Gordon Wheeler
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993).
146
Departing from the naturalistic settings called for in Valentin’s script, nearly
every one of the forty-eight short scenes in the Bremen production included a visual
reference to American Pop art. The sets included a items enlarged to roughly one hundred
times life size and painted on flat backdrops: a pair of lips, a grid of numbers, the letter
A, an ice cream cone, a cartoon of a smiling boy, and an athletic-wear advertisement.
Minks suspended these pieces from a track so that they could be swiftly slid on and off
stage. Overhead, Minks installed a light-emitting diode (LED) screen that displayed text
from the characters’ interior monologues (fig. 2). The naturalistic settings for which
Valentin’s script calls are a schoolyard, classrooms, a teachers’ lounge, and domestic
interiors. The Pop-art backdrops Minks created were therefore additional to and not
actually suggested by the playwright’s instructions.
308
Minks’ set pieces blurred the two
contemporaneous readings of American Pop art in Germany; sometimes the images on
stage appeared to poke fun at American popular culture and other times they seemed to
genuinely revere it. In either case, Pop was called on stage to guide a narrative about
political debates between left and right, students and parents.
The production opened with the class of male students singing a song about the
rewards of hard work and piety, while the LED broadcast the text of a private note one of
the students was writing to another: “Petrie writes… I would prefer literally anything to
this sappy religious song.” Some of the set pieces appropriated content directly from pre-
existing works by Wesselmann (lips) and Oldenburg (ice cream), while others made
indirect references to Pop through the compositional techniques of enlargement and serial

308
Valentin was present during the planning of the production in Bremen and in fact
hired by the theater as a dramaturge following the production so the Pop-art aesthetic
embellished and gave new meaning to the script but still had the author’s approval.
147
repetition of popular source images. The scenes moved briskly, averaging about one
minute each, the images sliding back and forth and making multiple appearances but not
always representing the same locale. Added to the dynamics of peer pressure and
competition in a small boys school, the images offered a glimpse of West German
affluence and its discontents. Zadek remarked that the play’s “dozens of characters and
infinite number of scenes,” amounted to, “an image of the Federal Republic.”
309

In the play, the students came from wealthy families and were surrounded by the
newest commodities from the United States but were nevertheless restless and
recalcitrant. In one scene, Minks developed a backdrop based on an advertisement for a
set of twelve tee shirts by a French clothing company, each referring to a sign of the
zodiac (see fig. 2). Models with exaggerated smiles don shirts emblazoned with bold
collegiate-style lettering. By enlarging and cropping the advertisement and allowing the
rectangular proscenium to occlude figures and text, Minks applied a method to the
advertisement that Lichtenstein had to comic book frames. Both artists enlarged, cropped,
and modified their sources in order to abstract the image and transform it from a narrative
into a mood, suggested by forms and colors.
The cafeteria where students and faculty spent time after school was outfitted with
a soda bar, a jukebox, and a waffle cone, painted with three different colored scoops of
ice cream and standing about ten feet tall (fig. 3). Minks’ erect, monumental cone seems
a far cry from Oldenburg and Patty Mucha’s flaccid fabric Floor Cone of 1962, exhibited
at Green Gallery (New York, 1962; fig. 4) and Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles, 1963). Minks
and Zadek discussed being inspired by Oldenburg sculpture and, although they did not

309
Plessen, Peter Zadek und seine Bühnenbildner (2012), 27.
148
name this one, it is likely they had seen it, at least in reproduction. Sonnabend included a
smaller version by Oldenburg in a highly publicized 1963 exhibition in Paris (fig. 5).
Oldenburg’s sculpture lay horizontally atop a pedestal in Sonnabend’s gallery, seeming
once more to provide a different notion of sculpture than Minks’ set piece. Yet, both
Oldenburg and Minks enlarged the object to obscene proportions, highlighting the artifice
of their creations, and reminding the onlooker that what appears realist and quotidian is in
fact a trigger for abstract associations, not merely the representation of an ice cream cone.
In interviews, Minks repeatedly claimed that the task of a theatrical set design is to offer
“not a literary explanation, but formal, atmospheric, and associative ones.”
310
One critic
described the “enormous ice cream cone” (gewaltige Eistüte) as among Minks’ many
“painted motifs from today’s world.”
311
The defamiliarization of the image was the
Minks’ operative mode of Pop art, and if he was not appropriating Pop imagery in this
case, he was appropriating a Pop mode.
The most explicit appropriation of actual content from American Pop art was a
reference to Wesselmann in the form of lush, pursed lips, painted about ten feet wide,
behind a tube of lipstick (fig. 6). The audience first saw the backdrop in a domestic scene
between a student and his parents. The actors reclined on cloth patio chairs, reading the
newspaper and watching television, the father smoking cigarettes. Under the enormous
tube of lipstick, luxury and leisure were the contentious meeting points of two
generations with distinct views of recent history. In this scene, a student, Rull, in

310
Jürgen Fischer, ed. Spielzeit 1965-66 Theater der freien Hansestadt Bremen Vol. 9
(Bremen: B. C. Heye & Co., 1965), 10.
311
“Motiven aus der Welt von heute bemalt.” Hans Berndt, “Rebellion gegen die Penne:
Thomas Valentins dramatisierter Roman ‘Die Unberaten’ in Bremen,” Mannheimer
Morgen (30 Nov 1965): 20 in ADK Franz Gauker Sammlung, Signatur 81 (PH 7A).
149
conversation with his parents, exposed the collective amnesia of their generation as well
as his teacher’s complicity in the operations of the Third Reich:
(Father Rull lights a cigarette and goes to the bookcase)
Rull: Give me one too!
(Father gives Rull a book)
Father: Here! Go ahead and read that through! Then perhaps you will understand
a thing or two.
Rull: Hans Grimm – he was a Nazi.
Father: So? Which of your teachers is feeding you this information?
Rull: Dr. Nemitz.
Father: Oh, that Karl Nemitz! Imagine that! That chameleon who concocted his
blarney to get him out of the whole scandal with the [Nazi newspaper] Völkischer
Beobachter. Ironic that Karl Nemitz should stand before you and drag poor Hans
Grimm through the mud!
Rull: I can ask him about it.
Mother: You will do no such thing.
312

Everywhere Rull and his classmates turned, they were faced with the Nazi past of their
parents and teachers, who were willing to blame each other but not assume fault
themselves.

The West German rhetoric of prosperity, rather than consciousness about the
nation’s past, was amplified by the enormous tube of lipstick overhead, signifying a
world of glamour, consumption, and the “making up” of something to appear different
than it actually is. Being a phallic and highly gendered symbol, the lipstick also seemed
emblematic of the mother’s muteness relative to the father.
The backdrop appeared again in a party scene in which students danced and
played games. Before the image, students questioned the representations of East
Germany’s economy and culture with which their parents and the West German press has
presented them.
Adlum: Why do you never even consider putting the eastern zone under your
critical magnifying glass?

312
Thomas Valentin and Robert Muller, Die Unberatenen (Berlin: Felix Bloch Erben,
1967), 23.
150
Satemin: I’ve never denied that there’s a development crisis in East Germany.
Claussen: But you are not willing to acknowledge that we have our own crises?
Satemin: Sure! But East Germany is progressing in a forward direction. Their
crises have been thoroughly examined. The Federal Republic is developing
backwards. Our crises will end in agony.
313

This exchange captures a politicized student generation living the tension between
capitalism and communism.
The program booklet shed some light on what Wesselmann meant for the
producers in this context, particularly in a roundtable discussion between Minks, Zadek,
Valentin, and, Robert Müller, a screenwriter who assisted in adapting the novel into a
script.
314
Minks explained that for him it was important the images were interchangeable,
rather than referring to specific settings or even fixed concepts: “I believe that when the
lipstick appears, the audience perceives it no more as a reality but as a symbol… the
images must be suitable for various applications if they are to not take on a literary
relationship [to the text].”
315
He also added that they play an important function in
abstracting the space of the stage: “Moreover, the images have another task, to abstract…
As soon as I insert something new, like a picture, this wall no longer has the value of a
wall in reality, but its own, independent spatial identity.”
316
While Wesselmann did not

313
Ibid., 77-8.
314
“Gespräch über ‘Die Unberatenen’ zwischen Thomas Valentin, Robert Müller,
Wilfried Minks, Peter Zadek,” in Spielzeit 1965-66 Theater der freien Hansestadt
Bremen, ed. Jürgen Fischer, Vol. 9 (Bremen: B. C. Heye & Co., 1965) in DTM.
315
“Ich glaube, wenn ein Lippenstift auftaucht, empfindet das Publikum so etwas nicht
mehr als Realität, sondern als Symbol… Die Bilder müssen beliebig einsetzbar sein,
wenn sie nicht eine literarische Beziehung bekommen sollen.” Quoted in “Gespräch über
‘Die Unberatenen’ zwischen Thomas Valentin, Robert Müller, Wilfried Minks, Peter
Zadek,” in Spielzeit 1965-66 Theater der freien Hansestadt Bremen, ed. Jürgen Fischer,
Vol. 9 (Bremen: B. C. Heye & Co., 1965), 10 in DTM.
316
“Darüberhinaus haben die Bilder noch eine andere Aufgabe, zu abstrahieren. Wenn
ich mir an deren Stelle eine normale Wand denke, wirkt sie als Zimmerwand, und der
Raum davor wird räumlich banalisiert. Sobald ich ein anderes Mittel einsetze, z.B. so ein
151
share this psychic investment in banal objects, he did work on large-scale works
occasionally that transformed, and perhaps also “abstracted” space, as in his Great
American Nude #54 (1964; fig. 7) and his later Still Life #60 (1973; fig. 8).
Although Wesselmann would have been more familiar to museum audiences than
theatergoers, Wesselmann’s paintings were also reproduced in the popular magazine, Der
Spiegel and he occupied a privileged place in German culture.
317
Zadek recalled seeing
works by Wesselmann before knowing anything else about American Pop art.
318
Richard
Holbrooke, a former United States ambassador to Germany, boasted in the catalogue of a
1994 German-organized Wesselmann exhibition, “for almost fifty years, American
popular culture has had a substantial influence over German daily life. Which artist
would be better suited to help us reflect on this influence than Tom Wesselmann?”
319
Offering a slightly different side of Wesselmann’s reception, Huyssen claimed that in the
1960s, West Germans associated Wesselmann with “beat and rock music, poster art, the
flower child cult and the drug scene.”
320
To the extent that the subculture at issue was
based on an American model, the Wesselmann-inspired set piece was well suited to make
the transatlantic connection.
Even critics who did not read the program and did not know Wesselmann by
name recognized in the exclamatory presentation of the quotidian the imagery on stage as
“Pop.” Without referring to Wesselmann by name, critics referred to the “Pop-art scale”

Bild, hat diese Wand nicht mehr den realen Wert einer Zimmerwand, sondern wird zu
einem eigenen, selbständigen Raumkörper.” Ibid.
317
“Pop Art: Suppe fürs Volk,” Der Spiegel 46 (1964): 140.
318
Plessen, Peter Zadek und seine Bühnenbildner (2012), 342.
319
Thomas Buchsteiner and Otto Letze, eds., Tom Wesselmann, 1959-1993
(Ostfildern/Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag, 1994) 9.
320
Huyssen 1975, 77.
152
of the objects on stage, “pop-art backgrounds,” “sheer Pop art,” and “Pop-billboards.”
321
The audience comprehended that “Pop” was signified on stage through visual
exaggeration, manipulation, saturation, enlargement, and a commercial aesthetic.
American Pop, in their eyes, was not necessarily associated with Warhol or Lichtenstein,
but rather with a mode of visual appropriation and adaptation.
The repercussions of a globalized consumer culture, so prominent in
Wesselmann’s work, also dominate Valentin’s script, in which characters criticize East
German autarky only to prove their own ignorance about how East Germany’s economy
actually differed from the social market economy of West Germany. Between 1960 and
1985 the consumption of leisure goods and activities in West Germany in fact rose four
hundred percent, due in no small measure to the government’s espousal of “Wohlstand
für alle,” or prosperity for all.
322
The students’ frustration with teachers and parents in the
play constituted a sharp rebuttal to the ideology of the economic miracle, whose
architects touted the neoliberal conflation of wealth and happiness.
323
Wesselmann’s
canvases from the early and mid-1960s take up consumer objects and eroticized bodies as
their main subjects. Most products are of American manufacture, such as Coca-Cola,
Lucky Strike cigarettes, and Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereal, either painted or cut out from

321
“Little Luther,” Der Spiegel No. 49 (1 Dec 1965); Joshua Ossia Trilling, “German
Play about Perplexed Schoolboys,” Times (22 Jan 1966); Ernst Wendt, “Bremische
Dramaturgie” Stuttgarter Zeitung (1 Dec 1965); and Ernst Günter Engelhard,
“Studienräte: ‘Die Unberatenen’ von Thomas Valentin,” Christ und Welt (9 Dec 1965) in
ADK Franz Gauker Sammlung, Signatur 81 (PH 7A).
322
Wolfgang Glatzer et al., Recent Social Trends in West Germany 1960-1990 (Frankfurt
am Main: Campus Verlag and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 444.
323
“Wohlstand für alle” was the title of a famous speech and subsequently a book by
finance minister Ludwig Erhard in 1957 and became the slogan of the reigning political
party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). See Erica Carter, How German Is She?
Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1997), 2.
153
the store-bought product and collaged onto canvas (fig. 9). Other products are imports,
such his three-dimensional paintings of the Volkswagen Type 1 (the “Bug” or “Beetle”).
This German product’s miraculously re-branding from Hitler’s brainchild to the
unofficial car of the hippie movement demonstrated that commodities flowed in both
directions between West Germany and the United States (fig. 10).
Within the staging of the play, we see a performance of the kind of recycling and
repurposing of images from among a limited set that is itself characteristic of Pop art. The
meaning of these particular images therefore shifts in relation to the context in which they
are viewed at any given moment in the play. When one considers the theatrical backdrops
as signs or symbols instead of literal references to the world of objects, further readings
of the play emerge. Valentin’s text only appeared to be about high school boys just as the
set pieces only appeared to be about lips or ice cream. As one critic put it, “Parents and
teachers try to sweep twelve years [of fascism] under the rug… they avoid talking about
idealism but then get upset that their children lack it.”
324
The grossly enlarged tube of
lipstick, clothing advertisement, and ice cream cone pointed to the indoctrination of
German youth into a consumer culture they feared was being used to fill the unbearable
silence about the Nazi past of their elders.

Andy Warhol and the Celebrity Portrait

The Theater Bremen’s 1965 production of Spring’s Awakening: A Children’s
Tragedy continued The Un-advised’s use of Pop art to examine generational conflict,

324
Sonja Luyken, “Ratlosigkeit bei alt und jung,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten (1 Dec 1965)
in ADK Franz Gauker Sammlung, Signatur 81 (PH 7A).
154
moral codes, conformity, and religious values. Frank Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening
premiered in 1906 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.
325
Wedekind wrote the play fifteen
years earlier, addressing the consequences of moralistic and sexually repressive child
rearing. The script approaches topics such as rape, abuse, homosexuality, suicide, and
abortion. Among the play’s characters, a teenage girl, Wendla, is denied answers from
her mother about sex and is later raped by one of her male classmates. Her mother orders
an abortion that turns out to be fatal. Wendla’s classmate Moritz is preoccupied with
sexual arousal and pubescent changes, which his parents refuse to discuss with him.
Upon his expulsion from school on grounds of poor performance he commits suicide.
Practically the only characters who do not suffer a fatal or traumatic experience on stage
are the boys Hänschen and Ernst, who confess their love for each other toward the end of
the play.
As in the previous production, Minks’ appropriation of Pop art’s modes of visual
production gave the script contemporary currency, making Wedekind’s script appear to
be about social mores versus popular culture in the postwar era. The play brings its
audience face-to-face with the harrowing primal scenes that constitute melodrama, made
all the more real and current for the live audience by the inclusion of melodramatic Pop
imagery, specifically a black-and-white wall-size portrait of British film star Rita
Tushingham. Minks hung a row of spotlights about fifteen feet above the stage,
illuminating the audience throughout the performance. The track lighting supported the
enlarged Tushingham portrait, which slid back and forth horizontally to create discrete
spaces for action and to facilitate swift scene changes (fig. 11-12).

325
Jonathan Franzen, “Introduction,” Spring Awakening (New York: Dramatists Play
Services, 2008), 2-11.
155
The choice of Tushingham for the blow-up portrait used throughout the
production followed Warhol’s criteria for selecting female subjects. While Warhol based
his portraits of Marilyn Monroe on vintage photographs to heighten the works’ nostalgic
value, his portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis were based on recent photographs,
which made the subject appear more current.
326
Minks and Zadek chose a contemporary
portrait of a living film star that was recognizable to the audience. Tushingham was best
known for her role in the British “New Wave” film, A Taste of Honey (1961) in which
she played the role of a young pregnant woman with a black lover and a homosexual best
friend. Tushingham’s other major film work at the time of the Bremen production was
The Leather Boys (1963), in which she played the sexually liberated wife of a bisexual
man. Her stardom in Europe was thus linked to core issues at the heart of Wedekind’s
play as well as the counterculture as it emerged in the 1960s in the United States, the
United Kingdom, and the New Left in Western Europe: women’s liberation and civil
rights for racial and sexual minorities.
The film still Minks chose to crop and then enlarge for the stage comes from the
1964 film Girl with Green Eyes (fig. 13). Tushingham plays a young, naïve farm girl who
moves to Dublin, falls in love with a married man twice her age, and develops an
emotionally dependence on him at the same time as the relationship completely falls
apart. This performance solidified Tushingham’s career, and with its many close-ups of
her face, turned her into an icon. As one critic wrote, “in case you have wondered about
the future of Rita Tushingham, the plain-face little actress with the big eyes, big mouth
and pointed nose who was so good in ‘A Taste of Honey,’ you may set your mind at ease.

326
Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol” in Annette
Michelson, Andy Warhol (2001), 53.
156
She is handsomely capitalizing on her odd and wistful looks in the British film, ‘Girl
With Green Eyes.”
327
The review lavishes more words on Tushingham’s “odd” facial
features than any other aspect of the film, adding, “even though this is a black and white
picture, you can sense that her great round eyes are green.”
328
Her transformation into a
film-critic-favorite a year before the Spring’s Awakening production, and this attention to
her captivating face are important background for understanding how Minks’ stage
backdrop and the production, in general, exploited a mode of Warholian celebrity
portraiture.
As a picture of a celebrity’s face is reproduced over and over again and
distributed in printed media, that face becomes an iconic image rather than the visage of a
particular human. It becomes “eternalized,” to use Siegfried Kracauer’s phrasing from a
1927 essay, “Photography,” which anxiously described the inundation of photographs in
illustrated newspapers in a way that illuminates the repetitions of Tushingham’s face on
film and television in the mid-1960s.
329
In arguing that photographs are incapable of
representing time, Kracauer wrote, “This is what the film diva looks like… If one were to
look through a magnifying glass one could make out the grain, the millions of little dots
that constitute the diva… The bangs, the seductive position of the head… all these
details, diligently recorded by the camera, are in their proper place, a flawless
appearance. Everyone recognizes her with delight since everyone has already seen the

327
Rosley Crowther, “Screen: ‘Girl With Green Eyes’ Arrives: Tale of Fleeting Love Is
at the Fine Arts,” New York Times (11 Aug 1964), online.
328
Ibid.
329
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” [1927], trans. Thomas Levin, Critical Inquiry 19.3
(Spring 1993): 433.
157
original on the screen.”
330
He was being facetious. His point, and this applies to
Tushingham as well, was that the more reproductions of a single image of a face we are
exposed to, the more vulnerable we are to not being able to pick out the face of that
specific person from a crowd. Warhol’s portraiture methods thematized this assault on
the image by using techniques of serial reproduction. On the Bremen stage, the
Tushingham portrait came to stand in for Wendla and took on a mournful tone, as with
Warhol’s portraits of the late Marilyn Monroe.
Minks and Zadek turned even the Brechtian stage elements into formal
components of the stage, ordering it visually through grids and repeated forms. The
horizontal and vertical lines that divided the stage into a grid of rectangles and even in the
row of spotlights, were not merely atmospheric or practical, but also formal devices. The
set “laid bare the device,” to use the terminology of Russian Formalism, and as a result
opened the script for the audience.
331
It took form as its content; how things are put
together was not mystified but put on display and made the subject of art. Not all of the
critics quoted earlier saw American Pop art as taking part in this tradition of radical
visual disclosure. The portrait in Spring’s Awakening, however, created by an artist
deeply impacted by American Pop, called attention to the way in which the visual codes

330
Ibid., 422-23.
331
The theorist who developed this vocabulary, and whose writings were absorbed in
interwar Germany, was Viktor Shlovskii. See Shlovskii, “Art as Technique” [1917] in
Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) and “On the Connection Between
Devices of Syuzhet and General Stylistic Devices” [1919] in Russian Formalism” A
Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 48-72. See also Andrzej Karcz, The Polish
Formalist School and Russian Formalism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press and
Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2002), 166 and Douglas Robinson, Estrangement
and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shlovsky, Brecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008), 167-77.
158
he appropriated from Warhol are ones that parody the objects of capitalist production.
Paired with the aggressive lighting and a swiftly moving set piece, the image was
mobilized, literally, in order to reveal the theatrical apparatus.
Minks’ stage set was not supplemental to Wedekind’s drama but the other way
around. A drama about the tragedy that occurs when social and moral conventions are
mistaken as “natural” is a morality play about the dangers of ideology. The norm in
naturalistic set design was to conceal technical equipment, to make believe as if the
action on stage were happening in real time in the outside world. Modern set design was
premised on this notion of illusion and prided itself on trap doors, elevators, fog
machines, and blackout curtains. These methods of masking the means of production as
invisible are ideological, and by laying them bare, the Bremen stage visualized the
conventionality of theater and art rather than affirming a belief in their timelessness and
transparency. That this unmasking also had political and historical currency made the
theater’s intervention into postwar drama and the production history of Spring’s
Awakening all the more consequential.
Zadek and Minks took the idea to flood the audience with light from Brecht’s
writings on theater.
332
Brecht sought to shake audiences from comfortable, passive
viewing stances and to show them that they were in fact socially engaged with the actors
on stage. To this end, Brecht directed actors to address the audience directly and to
unexpectedly break into song. Likewise, his set designers openly displayed technical
equipment such as light sources and curtain tracks rather than trying to maintain a

332
Plessen, Peter Zadek und seine Bühnenbildner (2012), 26.
159
seamless illusion of reality on stage.
333
In Brecht’s productions at the Berliner Ensemble
in the 1940s and 1950s, he kept the audience lights on at maximum brightness throughout
the performance with the lighting apparatus in plain sight.
334
Critics of the Bremen
production objected to the revival of this strategy, complaining that it caused headaches
and restlessness.
335
Zadek countered that the audience members were so aware that others
could see their every move that they ended up more concentrated on the stage than ever
before. The reference to Brecht was not lost on German theater audiences. One critic
remarked that Zadek and Minks brought Wedekind’s tragedy “into Brecht’s bright
light.”
336
Another wrote of stage lighting “in the style of Brecht.”
337

In discussions of theater and performance outside of divided Germany, references
to Brecht typically signaled “avant-garde” because of his circle of experimental artists
and his insistence on defamiliarizing the traditional experience of theater. In postwar
Germany, however, Brecht’s reception changed constantly on both sides of the Berlin
wall.
338
Brecht’s decision to return from exile to East Germany in 1948 coupled with his
well-known enthusiasm for Marxist theory, prompted West German theater aficionados

333
See Philip Glahn, Estrangement and Politicization (2007), 5.
334
Richard Eldridge, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 511.
335
Friedrich Herzfeld, “Mit kleiner Münze - aber genau und virtuos,” Ruhr-Nachrichten -
Essener Tageblatt (19 May 1966) and Marianne Koch, “‘Frühlings Erwachen’ im hellen
Theater,” Bild Zeitung (20 May 1966) in ADK Franz Gauker Sammlung, Folder 68 / PH
7A.
336
Horst Windelbroth, “Ewige Gefährdung der Jugend,” Berliner Morgenpost (20 May
1966) in ibid.
337
Günther Grack, “Wedekind für Heute” Das Tagesspiegel (19 May 1966) in ibid.
338
Carl Weber, “Brecht in Eclipse?” The Drama Review 24.1 (1980): 115-124, and
“German Theater: Between the Past and the Future,” Performing Arts Journal 13.1
(January 1991): 43-59.
160
to affix Brecht’s plays to the actions of the socialist government.
339
One review of the
1965 production reported that Zadek and Minks followed “the Brechtian didactic precept
of brilliant, undimmed lights” and another claimed, “The Brechtian requirement of bright
lighting was taken to the extreme.”
340

Some West German newspapers avoided using Brecht’s name, presumably to
distance the avant-garde nature of the production from a repressive socialist culture with
which West Germans occasionally associated Brecht in the 1960s. By 1965, however,
despite the barriers on travel out of East Germany, there was more exchange of ideas
among artists in both Germanys international theater and art festivals than the scholarship
suggests. Patrick Major makes the point that “the wall was never a truly hermetic barrier.
Like a one-way valve, it operated in one direction, yet western influences continued to
seep into the GDR from the outside.”
341
What was avant-garde about this Bremen
production, in other words, was its appropriation of Brechtian, East German, and
therefore socialist, theater practice. This was avant-garde because Brecht was so
contested at this time in West Germany.
The socialist impulse of Brecht’s epic theater in the stage aesthetics of Spring’s
Awakening was so evident that fifteen years later, the Beijing-based theater magazine,
Foreign Drama (Waiguo xiju) included an image of the production, with the caption,

339
David Ashley Hughes summarizes Brecht’s reception as influenced by Cold War
events in, “Notes on the German Theater Crisis,” The Drama Review 51.4 (2007) 139;
Neither Germany ever entirely stopped staging Brecht’s plays, however, and his theories
continued to inform dramaturgical decisions in both Germanys. See Stefan Mahlke, Ulla
Neuerburg and Ralph Denzer, “Brecht +/- Müller: German-German Brecht Images before
and after 1989,” The Drama Review 43.4 (1999): 42.
340
“Bremen Accepts Wedekind,” Times (nd); and Ernst Wendt, “...und in Bremen,”
Stuttgarter Zeitung (nd), both in ADK Franz Gauker Sammlung, Folder 68 / PH 7A.
341
Patrick Major, Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 188.
161
“Peter Zadek puts on Spring Awakening by Wilfried Minks in East Germany” (fig. 14).
342

The production’s blurring of authorship is magnified in this bizarre reprinting, in which
neither the caption nor any of the other texts in the foldout mentions the actual
playwright; rather, the text reads as if the set designer, Minks, was the author. The
caption to the right of the image, erroneously suggesting the production took place in
East Germany, also suggests the play’s Brechtian emphases overshadowed its actual
occurrence in West Germany.
In the epic theater tradition, it was the responsibility of the director, designer, and
actors, to convey to the audience their contemporary moment’s relationship to the history
being enacted. As Piscator wrote of one of his interwar productions, which made
reference to recent history, the audience and actors became a single mass brought into
“active participation.”
343
As a result of historical resonances between the dramatic action
and contemporary experience, “the masses took over the direction. The people who filled
the house had for the most part been actively involved in the period, and what we were
showing them was in a true sense their own fate, their own tragedy being acted out before
their eyes. Theater had become reality, and soon it was not a case of the stage confronting
the audience, but one big assembly, one big battlefield, one massive demonstration. It
was this unity that proved that evening that political theater could be effective
agitation.”
344
Piscator developed his notion of theatrical-political agitation as a result of
the inadequacy with which he regarded bourgeois forms of theater after World War I,

342
“April 12, 1965, Peter Zadek puts on Spring Awakening by Wei-er-fu-te Ming-ke-si,”
Waiguo xiju, 外國戲劇, Vol. 2 (1981): 80-81. Wei-er-fu-te Ming-ke-si is a Chinese
adaptation of “Wilfried Minks.” The lettering to the right underneath the skeleton reads,
“On the East German Stage.” Translations by Tarryn Li-Min Chun.
343
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre [1929] (New York: Avon Books, 1978), 96-97.
344
Ibid.
162
inspired by the Russian Revolution, and into the years when it seemed a popular uprising
(in part inspired by the Proletarian Theater) could defeat fascism. The political
possibilities for theater in West Germany in 1966 were not as clearly defined. Spring’s
Awakening was not as politically radical as Piscator’s theater had been in the 1920s, but
neither was Piscator, who died almost exactly a month before the premier of Spring’s
Awakening from his adopted home in one of West Berlin’s bourgeois neighborhoods.
Spring’s Awakening did, however, offer a staged representation of contemporary German
problems and placed the audience in a specific relation to those problems. This was a
more Brechtian situation of moral ambiguity, intended to train audiences to develop
ethical and empathic responses.
Zadek did in fact encourage audience members to vocalize their feedback while
watching a production, in the manner of athletics spectators.
345
Critic Günther Grack
described the way in which Minks’ lighting scheme “activated the public,” which simply
means they were forced to pay attention and cogitate on what was transpiring, rather than
letting their minds wander.
346
Another critic wrote about how the exposure of would-be-
spectators in a bath of light transformed them into active “partners.”
347
And one more
referred to “the social emancipation of the Bremen theatergoer” via his or her visual,
illuminated (enlightened) presence in the theater.
348
Importantly, audiences did not appear

345
Ron Engle, “Audience, Style, and Language in the Shakespeare of Peter Zadek,” in
Dennis Kennedy, ed., Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 1993), 95.
346
Günther Grack, “Wedekind für Heute,” Das Tagesspiegel (19 May 1966) in ibid.
347
Erich Emigholz, “Wedekind in reinem Licht,” Bremer Nachrichten (27 Apr 1965) in
ibid.
348
“Bremen Accepts Wedekind,” Times (nd) in ibid.
163
to leave for the toilet, fidget, or sleep.
349
In addition to the acuteness of their presence,
their attentiveness was related to the demands placed on them to cognitively shuttle
between Wedekind’s late-nineteenth-century context and the popular visual culture of the
1960s, signaled by the portrait of Tushingham.

Roy Lichtenstein’s War Comics on Stage

In March 1966 Zadek and Minks staged The Robbers, the first play ever written
by Schiller. (fig. 15). Published in 1781, The Robbers is a bourgeois family melodrama
between two aristocratic brothers, Karl and Franz Moor. The elder son, Karl, is idealistic
and emotional, while Franz, the unloved second-born, is wicked and calculating. Karl
leads a group of rebellious students to the woods to become Robin Hood-like bandits
while Franz unsuccessfully attempts to inherit his father’s estate. Schiller used alternating
scenes to set the brothers in dialogue, raising questions of greed and charity, good and
evil. The Robbers is often credited with being among the first melodramas. Literary
scholar Stephanie Hammer writes that both Schiller’s “playbill for the first productions
and his many published and unpublished forewords to and commentaries on The Robbers
emphasize the production of unbridled emotionality.”
350
Schiller wrote The Robbers as
the bourgeoisie in France, England, and eventually Germanic lands, consolidated its
power. In the play, aristocrats and clergy try to use wealth to absolve themselves of moral
wrongdoing.

349
Frühlings Erwachen, Bremen, 1965, video 6 in ADK Franz Gauker Sammlung, Folder
68 / PH 7A.
350
Stephanie Berbé Hammer, Schiller’s Wound: The Theater of Trauma from Crisis to
Commodity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 33.
164
For the Bremen production, Minks modified and enlarged the lithograph by
Lichtenstein. The production took place early in 1966, coinciding with a shift in the
German student generation’s perceptions of American Pop art from a manifestation of the
New Left to the style of an art-collecting elite, with links to American corporatism, and
by extension a U.S. ground war in Vietnam initiated exactly a year before the production.
In light of these events, the Pop-inspired stage highlighted that Schiller’s two main
characters, one mercenary, the other a well-intentioned criminal, are both victims of an
absent father. Many men who survived the War were still in Soviet POW camps and the
“absence of the father” had become a major trope for the generation coming of age in the
1950 and 1960s.
351
In some parts of Germany, one third of all children were being raised
by “war widows.”
352
In 1966 the West German government was using the rhetoric of a
postwar return to moral order, or “normalization,” and conflated this moral order with
economic stability and growth. This production reminded audiences that their country’s
newfound prosperity did nothing to absolve the crimes of its absent fathers.
Critics acknowledged that the Bremen production represented an intervention into
the reception history of one of German literature’s most canonical texts but reviewers
were uncertain of whether that should be praised or criticized. Critics continued to weight
in as segments of the production were broadcast on television between 1967 and 1868.
The reception of the Pop-inspired production mirrored West Germans’ conflicted

351
See Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in
Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
352
David P. Conradt and Eric Langenbacher, The German Polity (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 77.
165
responses to Pop art. Some faulted the Theater Bremen for unnecessary provocation.
353
The publication Volksbühne Bremen protested the production for months, printing
impassioned views from defenders and detractors: “Here, cheap sensation is produced for
the sake of sensation alone. Actually, every word, every syllable expended is more than it
deserves. We should just hush up on the matter.”
354
A counter-response declared that the
audience should be grateful that the classics are no longer synonymous with boredom.
355
Classical German culture was at stake and Schiller was either going to be a moral
compass for the “fatherless” generation or a symbol of its parents’ conservatism.
For the stage backdrop Minks appropriated Lichtenstein’s lithograph, CRACK!,
which Lichtenstein produced in an edition of three hundred in 1963 as an announcement
for his second solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York (fig. 16).
Lichtenstein’s visual source was a frame from an issue of the comic series Star Spangled
War Stories published by DC Comics (fig. 17). The original comic featured the fictional
French Resistance fighter, Mademoiselle Marie, saving her hometown from invading
Nazis. Lichtenstein cropped the image, changed the sand dune to sand bags, reduced the
color palette, moved the speech bubble from Marie’s grandfather’s mouth to hers,
eliminated the word FIRE! and added a sighting element at the end of the gun barrel. For
the set piece, Minks further reduced the color palette by swapping out black for red,
multiplied the characters in CRACK!, evacuated the contents of the speech bubble, and

353
Henning Harmssen, “‘Die Räuber’ als Gruselstück,” Echo der Zeit (27 Mar 1966) and
Wilhelm Herrmann, “‘Die Räuber’ als Grusical: Schiller-Premiere im Theater am
Goetheplatz endete mit einem handfesten Skandal,” Weser-Kurrier (7 Mar 1966) in ADK
Peter Zadek Archiv, Räuber 1966.
354
“Protest der Volksbühne Bremen gegen die Zadek-Inszenierung ‘Die Räuber,’” Die
Volksbühne Bremen 18.9 (May 1966): 10-11 in ibid.
355
Manuel Franken, “Protest dem Protest,” Die Volksbühne Bremen 18.10 (Jun 1966): 3-
4 in ibid.
166
filled out the figure’s eyebrows and fingers to masculinize her. The backdrop, the single
piece of scenery on stage, was a sheet of cloth ten meters high and sixteen meters wide,
hand-painted in white, red, and yellow. Stylistically, Minks followed compositional
devices employed by Jasper Johns and Warhol: the figure was isolated at the center of the
composition and locked into place by a grid of repeating letters and billows of
gunpowder. If Lichtenstein cropped the comic strip frame to heighten its dramatic charge,
Minks doubled this process of dramatization by cropping Lichtenstein’s lithograph, but
then loosening up the composition around the borders, twice removing it from its original
comic book source.
Under the tutelage of Hoyt Sherman at Ohio State University in the 1940s,
Lichtenstein learned to draw in a laboratory of floodlights and enormous screens, the two
central elements of the Theater Bremen’s Pop-art stage designs.
356
The Bremen
production of The Robbers represented a further iteration of the transference of images
between media that constituted Lichtenstein’s practice. When Lichtenstein’s comic strip-
based lithograph was enlarged to form the theater backdrop, transferred to stage, and then
to television, it achieved the status of the Pop image as unfettered by any single medium.
While the Pop-inspired backdrop functioned on one level as a code for
understanding the melodramatic world of Schiller’s play, the content of the backdrop also
related directly to various scenes in The Robbers. In act V the wicked son, Franz, has a
vision of the final judgment: “The whole horizon seemed one great sheet of fire—the
mountains, towns and forests seemed to melt like wax in a furnace; and then a dreadful

356
Chrissie Iles, “See-Sickness: Roy Lichtenstein’s Moving Pictures,” in James Rondeau
and Sheena Wagstaff, Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2012), 58.
167
tempest arose, which drove before it the heavens, the earth, and the ocean.”
357
The
backdrop encapsulated this specter with clouds of smoke and an omnipotent voice of
doom bellowing “CRAK!” Franz’s cruelty makes him delirious with a paranoia that was
made all the more palpable by the image of a person firing at him from behind. Whereas
a theatergoer expects to be the one watching the action on stage, viewers here were met
with an image that watched them watching and stared down the actors at the same time.
The art historian Max Imdahl referred to this eerie phenomenon as “seeing seeing” (das
sehende Sehen) and Friedrich Heubach described how the subject, “perceives himself and
is perceived in the same moment.”
358
While Imdahl and Heubach were thinking about
contemporary visual art, those expressions are of particular use for the theater. Normally,
given uniform the arrangement of seats in an auditorium, dimmed lights, and the raised
stage, the last thing theatergoers expect is to be watched. This scenario had unsettling
resonances with contemporary reports of soviet spies and the East German Stasi.
As discussed earlier, Pop was shifting in West German public opinion from a
radically democratic and accessible style to one that endorsed conformism and
corporatism. Four months before the Bremen premiere, Der Spiegel published an article
describing the intensity of the American air raids over Vietnam with comparisons to
World War II and accompanying photographs of American bombers over North Vietnam
that in retrospect look as if they could have been source material for Lichtenstein’s war-

357
Friedrich Schiller. The Robbers: A Tragedy in Five Acts (New York: David
Longworth, 1808), 93.
358
Max Imdahl, Bildautonomie und Wirklichkeit: Zur theoretischen Begründung
moderner Malerei (Mittenwald: Maeander-Kunstverlag, 1981) and Friedrich Wofram
Heubach, “The Observed Eye, or Making Seeing Visible (On the video works of Dan
Graham)” [1960s], in Gloria Moure, ed., Dan Graham (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni
Tàpies, 1998), 191.
168
comic paintings.
359
The article’s comparison between American military tactics and the
Nazi Luftwaffe is indicative of the German press’ condemnation of the war in Vietnam
and what was perceived by many German press sources as an abuse of military strength
in the service of an imperialistic mission. In 1966, Der Spiegel published another article
on warfare between American and Vietcong soldiers with a photo of an American
crouching down with a rifle as in Lichtenstein’s lithograph (fig. 18).
360
While there is no
causal relationship, the enlarged lithograph on stage at a moment when the audience was
being overwhelmed with these types of combat images, would have contributed to a
reading of the stage image as particularly topical.
Minks did not track down the original comic book source, which blatantly tells a
story about Nazi resistance fighters in France. In fact, Minks assumed Lichtenstein’s
image was a reference to Vietnam: “When you look at Lichtenstein’s Vietnam War-
comic CRAK!, everything seems to pop out.”
361
As Minks’ set design changed the moral
thrust of Schiller’s work, it also gave audiences a new perspective on Lichtenstein. Art
historians writing on Lichtenstein have focused on the aesthetics of mechanical painting
and the artist’s appropriation of vernacular culture but have not thought of him as a
painter of moral statements. The reception of his art by the Bremen audience makes a
case for its largely overlooked political content. Lichtenstein produced CRACK! as news
outlets were printing images of young Vietcong recruits holding automatic weapons and

359
“Vietnam Luftkrieg,” Der Spiegel 46 (10 Nov 1965).
360
“Die Vernichtung einer amerikanishen Infanterie-Einheit in Vietnam,” Der Spiegel 47
(1966).
361
“Wenn du dir Lichtensteins Vietnamkriegs-Comic CRAK! anschaust, hat alles darauf
den Drang, nach vorne zu knallen.” Plessen, Peter Zadek und seine Bühnenbildner
(2012), 34.
169
being bludgeoned by American soldiers. The choice of subject matter had a political
currency even if Lichtenstein claimed not to notice it.
Zadek and Minks were drawn to Pop art because of its shock value and ability to
frame classical German plays in light of contemporary politics. One feature of
appropriation art in this production is that the artist loses a degree of authorship over the
way the image is read. Lichtenstein claimed, “I never really read a comic… I didn’t look
at comic books as anything except as a place to find these images…”
362
Minks,
meanwhile read the image as a Vietnam-War narrative, while Zadek put it in dialogue
with Schiller’s historical bourgeois drama. The critic who called the backdrop an
adaptation of “Rolf Lichtenstein,” brought these various “authors” together under a
fictitious, transatlantic concatenation. This is not the end of the image’s diffusion of
authorship or intermedial transfer, however. The development of authors and contributors
to such an image, appropriated from another artist’s mechanically reproducible source, as
this last section will show, is limitless.

Theater, Pop Art, Television

As with many Theater Bremen productions, The Un-advised and Spring’s
Awakening were filmed and televised in their entirety, while shorter clips from The
Robbers were featured on regional and national television programs. Such adaptations are

362
April Bernard and Mimi Thompson, “Roy Lichtenstein (interview),” BOMB 14
(1986): 22.
170
sometimes referred to as docudramas or Fernsehspiele (television plays).
363
Television
broadcasts of stage productions, of which Zadek produced more than thirty between 1960
and 1980, were considered to be documentaries because they recorded the stage action
from static camera positions, focusing on the performance rather than sophisticated
cinematography, and were usually accompanied by short interviews with members of the
production team. The 1960s saw the legitimation by film critics and scholars of the
Fernsehspiele, on a par with avant-garde films by documentarians like Werner Herzog
and Fassbinder.
364

Zadek and Minks’ Fernsehspiele re-mediated American Pop imagery and the live
experience of theater for a wider audience. Zadek worked for BBC television in the
1950s, where he learned that the medium of television could potentially democratize
“high culture” and broaden its appeal.
365
American Pop’s afterlives on West German
television brought Lichtenstein and Wesselmann’s imagery into dialogue with the
popular media of film and television. As Shyon Baumann has argued, “though Pop art
itself was not primarily a cinematic innovation, [it] nevertheless had important
consequences for the critical reception of film… Pop art facilitated the art world for film,
then, by helping to soften, or even reverse, the stigmas of industrial production and
commercialization.”
366
Zadek and Minks’ adaptation of images by artists in the United
States for stage sets that then became de facto television sets is symptomatic of the

363
Jane Shattuc, Television, Tabloids, and Tears: Fassbinder and Popular Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 50.
364
Stephan Becker, Die Fernseharbeiten Peter Zadeks der sechziger und siebziger Jahre:
Zur Koevolution der Medien Theater und Fernsehen (Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter
Heinz, 1997), 51.
365
Engle 94.
366
Shyon Baumann, Hollywood Highbrow: from Entertainment to Art (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 50.
171
culture of appropriation that Pop art initiated. If the three productions examined here took
on an anti-elitist charge in their live stage iterations, Zadek and Minks continued in this
direction by televising the productions and lifting the barriers of travel to the northern
city of Bremen and the cost of admission.
The three-hour stage production of The Un-advised was filmed in November
1965. Clips from the premiere were featured on the regional television program “Studio
III” the following month, and the play was aired in its entirety as part of the program
“Theater Heute” (Theater Today) in October 1966.
367
The shorter episode began with
interviews with the playwright, Valentin, who spoke about re-writing his novel for the
stage, and Minks, who discussed the task of devising forty-eight individual scenes. This
additional content contextualized the at-home experience as a translation of cultural
products, both textual and visual, across different media. In 1967 the play was aired on
two more regional stations, covering nearly all of West Germany.
368
The filming of The
Un-advised made use of four cameras behind the audience, which occasionally offered
close-up shots of the actors but never the sort of omnipresent panning and zooming one
might see in a big-budget film of the period (fig. 19). The frame was static and simulated
the view of a single audience member.
The rolling set pieces on and off stage, however, did create a visual effect similar
to filmic cutting and fading between scenes. As opposed to lengthy pauses and scenery
changes behind blackout curtains, as was customary in theater, both the theater and
television audiences saw and heard the set pieces sliding back and forth. Critic Peter

367
Stephan Becker, Die Fernseharbeiten Peter Zadeks (1997), 312, 348.
368
Die Unberatenen aired on Hessen III on 26 April 1967 and on WDR III (“The Third
Program”) on 1 September 1967. Ibid., 334.
172
Hentschel claimed that the production resembled the work of Piscator, an apt reference
given that Piscator and Brecht explicitly called for rapid and overt scene changes.
369
The
critic Ernst Wendt referred to the production as a “montage,” also an oblique reference to
the epic theater aesthetic Heartfield developed.
370

Zadek and Muller, both with backgrounds in television, seem to have envisioned
the production as a film or “moving picture” even before knowing it would appear on
television. Rather than proving that television flattens live experience, the aesthetics of
the stage showed that theater can be as exciting, rapid, and suspenseful as television. The
ability to change the channel when one becomes bored with a given television program
can be experienced as stimulating or even participatory. But rapid changes of content also
constitute a fragmented televisual experience, which was already figured into the stage
mechanics of The Un-advised, as when the rolling set pieces replaced one another thirty
seconds apart. In a single operation, television was rendered theatrical and epic, and
theater was made choppy and televisual.
In 1968, Zadek directed a film adaptation of The Un-advised titled I’m an
Elephant, Madame (Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame) with further changes to the script by a
television director, Wolfgang Menge. It was filmed in color at a Bremen high school not
far from the theater where Zadek first staged The Un-advised. The film appeared in

369
Peter Hentschel, “Krankheit der Jugend,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (1 Dec 1965) in ADK
Franz Gauker Sammlung, folder 81. On Brecht’s emulation of Piscator, see C. D. Innes,
Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre: The Development of Modern German Drama
(London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 192.
370
Ernst Wendt, “Bremische Dramaturgie,” Stuttgarter Zeitung (1 Dec 1965) in ADK
Franz Gauker Sammlung.
173
cinemas in 1969 and aired on German television in 1970, 1972, and 1975.
371
The film
does not quote images of American Pop art as the stage version did. Zadek did, however,
credit Warhol with the soundtrack (fig. 20).
372
Zadek credited Warhol for the soundtrack
on account of his use of the songs “I’m Waiting for the Man” (1967) and “The Gift”
(1968) by the Velvet Underground. Though Warhol is credited as the producer of the
album on which the former song was first released, he had very little to do with its actual
production.
373
In using Warhol’s name and the music of a band with which he was
associated, Zadek exploited the cultural associations of Pop art in West Germany,
specifically those of the counterculture, a distrust of authority figures and elite culture,
and the drug scene—which is the subject of “I’m Waiting for the Man.”
In the case of I’m an Elephant, Madame, Zadek appropriated one of the most
famous appropriation artists and assigned him works in a medium (music) in which he
barely worked. Zadek displayed a keen understanding of Warhol’s methods, or rather,
showed that those methods could result in authorial obfuscation similar to that which
occurs in theater and film production. A critic in Der Spiegel wrote that Rull, the
protagonist of I’m an Elephant, Madame, is presented as a “happy Pop character.”
374
This
use of “Pop” conflates its various meanings: popular culture, Pop art, and the West
German understanding of the artistic mode as anti-authoritarian. In one scene, the student
Rohwedder, wearing denim trousers and jacket with popped collar, hunches over in front

371
Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame aired on ARD on 13 October 1970, 3 November 1972,
and 11 July 1975. See Stephan Becker, Die Fernseharbeiten Peter Zadeks (1997), 317
and 335.
372
“Kerzen im Haar,” Der Speigel (3 Feb 1969): 134-5.
373
The songs were not written for the film. See Scott Schindler, “Velvet Underground” in
Scott Schindler and Andy Schwartz, eds., Icons of Rock: An Encyclopedia of the Legends
who Changed Music Forever (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 314.
374
“Ein frölicher Pop-Charakter.” “Kerzen im Haar,” Der Speigel (3 Feb 1969): 135.
174
of a beer bottle and an overflowing ashtray (fig. 21). A concerned group of students sits
opposite him, passing a marijuana cigarette and drinking beers, listening to Rohwedder
plot a demonstration against the abuse of authority among their school’s administration.
The camera positions Rohwedder between a poster of the comic book hero, Batman, and
the writing “Vietcong auf nach Bonn” (The Vietcong is coming for Bonn).
375
Der Spiegel
had recently speculated that the film Batman and Robin could become “as popular in
Germany as in the U.S.”
376
This mix of references to American popular culture, the
Vietnam War, and German leftist students, implies a critical understanding of American
culture and international policy and further suggests the West German government’s
implication in Vietnam through its economic dependence on the United States.
In March 1966, the theater’s production of Spring’s Awakening was broadcast on
television with a brief introduction explaining the dramaturgical intervention in this well-
known turn-of-the-century play.
377
It was broadcast several more times on channels

375
Despite Batman’s grim narrative of a traumatized orphan turned defender of justice in
a dystopian metropolis, superheroes were largely understood in Germany as representing
something upright. The cultural understanding of the American superhero in postwar
Germany is a complex issue, but it is fair to say that in 1960s in West Germany, Batman
was seen as a force for good, especially since he was first introduced in 1939 against the
backdrop of the consolidation of Italo-Germanic fascism. See Laurence Maslon and
Michael Kantor, Superheroes!: Capes, Cowls, and the Creation of Comic Book Culture
(New York: Crown Archetype, 2013); Martin Lund, “American Golem: Reading
America through Super-New Dealers and the ‘Melting Pot,’” [79-93], Jeanne Emerson
Gardner, “’Dreams May End, But Love Never Does’: Marriage and Materialism in
American Romance Comics, 1947-1954,” [94-109], and John Donovan, “Parody and
Propaganda: Fighting American and the Battle against Crime and Communism in the
1950s,” [110-19] in Matthew Pustz, Ed., Comic Books and American Cultural History:
An Anthology (New York and London: Continuum, 2012).
376
“Batman: Tante wacht,” Der Spiegel 39 (19 Sept 1966): 170.
377
In May it traveled to the West Berlin theater festival, Theatertreffen, and in 1967 to
London for the World Theater Festival along with The Un-advised.
175
covering most of West Germany.
378
Although the row of spotlights that had been aimed
at the live audience was often cut out of the camera’s frame and therefore lost the
Brechtian implication of audiences into the action, the rolling back and forth of the
Tushingham backdrop was audible in the television version, suggesting the multi-sensory
experience in the theater house. A sizable audience must have tuned in to see the actor
Vadim Glowna, who played the character Melchior; Glowna was an established “TV-
star” featured in West German tabloids.
379
The televisual qualities of the stage production
were made even more apparent on the actual television screen. The fact that the particular
face was that of a popular film actress doubled the sense of mediated closeness to
celebrity that the television offers.
The Robbers was the only productions in this chapter not televised in its entirety.
Clips, stills, and interviews relating to the 1966 production, however, were featured
shortly after the premier and as part of cultural programs in 1967 and 1968.
380
Even
before The Robbers came to television, critics used film and television references to
describe it. Several called the live performance an “Indianerspiel,” a reference to
Hollywood Westerns.
381
Franz was described as “Donald Duck,” “a film monster,

378
The Spring’s Awakening broadcasts took place on Nord 3 on March 2, 1966, WDR 3
on March 3, 1967, Bayern 3 on April 10, 1968, and WDR 3 on November 13, 1975. See
Stephan Becker, Die Fernseharbeiten Peter Zadeks (1997), 334-5.
379
Werner Aschemann, “Nach 14 Tagen packte Hamlet seine Koffer: TV-Star Vadim
Glowna brach Probe in Köln ab,” EXPRESS (19 Jan 1978) in TWS Hamlet 1978.
380
Stephan Becker, Die Fernseharbeiten Peter Zadeks (1997), 55-56, 348-9. The ADK
holds a study DVD of Die Räuber in color but the television clips are black and white.
381
“‘Die Räuber’ des 20. Jahrhunderts: Beifall, Pfiffe und Buhrufe für ‘höheres
Indianerspiel,’” NVZ (Norddeutsche Volkszeitung; 7 Mar 1966) in ADK Franz Gauker
Sammlung, Box 87.
176
Frankenstein, Dracula,” and “evil Walt Disney characters.”
382
Karl was described with
reference to “Superman and Phantom,” and the robber band as “heroes of the Wild
West.”
383
Though Minks claimed that the costumes, like the stage backdrop, were
inspired by comic strips, they seem also to have been based on Minks’ absorption of
popular characters from American Westerns and cartoons. This adheres to the set
designer’s Pop-art method of developing materials from vernacular culture for the stage
and speaks to the fluidity with which he, like Warhol and Lichtenstein, moved between
flat and dimensional, still and moving images.
Working with television equipment changed the way Zadek and Minks thought
about their work on stage. Minks explained, “I came very much from the fine arts and
[Zadek] from film,” both of which found expression in the medium of television.
384
The
technical requirements of television encouraged Minks to experiment with strong,
artificial tonal contrasts that in turn influenced the way he conceived of the stage, as a
canvas for melodrama, extreme emotion, and bold graphics. As he described, “This kind
of light could be produced for television much better than in theater because you have to
filter out the gray and shadow values. Through this unrealistic light the realistically
crafted scene took on an unfamiliar (fremd) aesthetic that strongly influenced the
content… We turned up the lighting so high that it came out as a sharp black and white

382
Ernst Wendt, “Die ‘Räuber’ in Bremen, Dracula heißt die Canaille, Eine Inszenierung
von Zadek/Minks,” Stuttgart Zeitung (17 Mar 1966) in ADK Peter Zadek Archiv, Räuber
1966.
383
Ibid.
384
“Ich kam sehr vom … der bildenden Kunst, er sehr vom Film.” Plessen, Peter Zadek
und seine Bühnenbildner (2012), 140.
177
contrast, like an expressionist woodcut.”
385
If working in the medium of advertising had
opened Warhol to the possibilities of using its methods to make fine art, working in film
would come to inform the Bremen Style in the theater house as well.
Although the preceding analyses of the Bremen broadcasts have tried to suggest
some of the differences in experiencing theater live versus on a television set, both
formats of theater spectatorship have in common a coming together of narrative, image,
music, and dialogue, albeit in an incongruous and defamiliarized way. The transitory and
flickering projections Heartfield had projected for Brecht’s 1951 production of The
Mother perhaps help to read television against the grain as well. But with television,
artists and were not leaving this subversion of mass culture up to static interference; they
were actively staging V-efects, interrupting regular programming, and asking viewers to
actually leave their seats and participate physically. These experiments flourished in the
1970s and will be discussed more in the next chapter.
The most prolific media theorists writing on television in the 1950s and 1960s in
Germany were not interested in its potential to offer Brechtian ruptures in the experience
of mass culture, in which truly critical thought might occur. Christine Mehring has shown
that early contributors to this postwar discourse based their views on research undertaken
during the Nazi period, when the television’s medial specificity was understood in terms

385
“Diese Art Licht könnte man fürs Fernsehen viel besser herstellen als im Theater, weil
man nur die Grau und Schattenwerte rausfiltern musste. Durch dieses unreale Licht
bekam die realistisch gearbeiteten Szene eine fremd wirkende Ästhetik, die die Sicht auf
den Inhalt stark beeinflusste… Wir überdrehten das Licht so stark, dass dabei eine
scharfe Schwarzweiß-Optik herauskam, holzschnitthaft oder expressionistisch,
beziehungsweise nach Expressionismus aussehend.” Ibid., 140-41.
178
of racial purity.
386
Even when the former Nazi theorist Gerhard Eckert changed his
position in the 1950s—from television as a propagandistic tool to a democratic site for
the dissemination of art—he did so based on a notion of medium specificity closely
related to his previous stance. While his aim shifted from racial purity to medium purity,
television, he believed, still ought to be used for broadcasting live events and news, since
those are forms of content unique to television, as opposed to film or theater.
387
This
position of medium specificity negatively portrayed theater as well as television, given
that theaters in the 1960s in West Germany were beginning to film their productions for
television, and also commission stage works by visual artists.
Zadek and Minks could genuinely take up the project of television as a
democratic form, even as an electronic iteration of epic theater, because television had
not ever fully become the vehicle of propaganda that Eckert predicted. On the contrary,
as Mehring writes, “while regular German television programming had started in 1935
and peaked in the broadcast of the 1936 Olympics, reception and the potential for
propaganda use were extremely limited—150,000 viewers had watched the sporting
events in twenty-seven viewing rooms throughout Berlin—and broadcasting stalled
during the war, as in other European countries.”
388
By the time The Robbers aired in
1965, television in Germany was just, for the very first time, becoming a truly mass
medium. In 1963, one of Germany’s first television critics, Kurt Wagenführ, commented
that television was often viewed from communal auditoriums where, “the spectator

386
Christine Mehring, “Television Art’s Abstract Starts: Europe circa 1944-1969,”
October 125 (Summer 2008): 37-39.
387
Gerhard Eckert, Die Kunst des Fernsehens: Umrisse eine Dramaturgie (Emsdetten:
Lechte, 1953).
388
Mehring 2008, 35
179
community is made up of a variety of small groups (usually families).”
389
Television
auditoriums or “pubs” (Fernsehstuben), as they were called, were being replaced by
private televisions, of which there were one million in Germany in 1957.
390
The
experience of watching the Bremen productions on television would not have been nearly
as formal as in the theater, but it was also still a social event that neighbors would gather
around to watch. The term “television pub” brings this moment in German television
history into sharp focus with the experiences of epic and proletarian theater. As Piscator
described, “The Proletarisches Theater performed in halls and assembly rooms. The
masses were to be met on their own ground. Anybody who has ever had anything to do
with these rooms and their little stages which scarcely even deserve the name, and who
knows the smell of stale beer and men’s toilets, the little flags and banners left over from
the last beer festival, can imagine the difficulties which faced us as we attempted to put
over our idea of a theater for the proletariat.”
391

Zadek and Minks were clearly excited about reaching a wider audience, as was
their contemporary Peter Stein, who would begin filming his Berlin theater productions
for television in the 1970s. It could be argued that the televised theater production was an
updated variation on the gesture Heartfield and Piscator made by traveling with the
Proletarian Theater to public halls in working class neighborhoods of Berlin in the 1920s.
The Fernsehspiele allowed access and offered flexibility for a wider audience. Their

389
Kurt Wagenführ quoted in Peter Hoff, “‘…das Bild der Führers in alle deutschen
Herzen!’ Das frühe deutsche Fernsehen als Gegenstand und als Medium der
nationalistischen Propaganda—eine ‘nicht bestellte Erfindung,’” in Die Anfänge des
deutschen Fernsehens, ed. William Uricchio (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991), 228.
390
Horace Newcomb, The Encyclopedia of Television, Vol. I (New York: Fitzroy
Dearborn, 2004), 982.
391
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1978), 49.
180
introductions reformatted the productions for an audience who did not necessarily read
the Weimar Classics (Goethe and Schiller) in school.
While Minks and Zadek were fairly successful at transferring Brechtian aesthetics
to television, some of the major media theorists of the decade considered such
undertakings to be too utopian. While television failed to become the medium of
manipulation that Nazi broadcasters intended in the 1930s, some critics in the postwar
years nevertheless classed it as propagandistic because of the way the apparatus turned
individual viewers, no matter how numerous, into a mass through the simultaneity of
transmission. Paradigmatic of those voices, Günther Anders wrote in 1956 that television
enslaves and infantilizes its viewers, and that the consumer of television “pays for selling
himself: he must purchase the very unfreedom he himself helps to produce.”
392

According to this view, television codes information, which is then partially deciphered
by acculturated viewers in a way that does not require deep thought about the program’s
substance.
The Bremen broadcasts highlighted that the cliché scenarios, routinization, and
social types that these television critics found so problematic are the content of Pop art.
While television certainly conditions viewers to digest visual information in a formulaic
way, Zadek and Minks used that formula to expose the codes of Pop art. In long shots the
BenDay dots, which were enlarged in the stage image as in Lichtenstein’s lithograph to
avoid blending together, did precisely that, cohering as a solid block of color on the

392
Günther Anders, “The Phantom Word of TV,” Norbert Guterman, trans., Dissent 3
(1956): 31. Lutz Koepnick discusses Anders in Framing Attention: Windows on Modern
German Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 231. See also
Theodor Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” The Quarterly of Film Radio and
Television 8.3 (Spring 1954): 226.
181
television screen. Audiences who already knew Lichtenstein’s paintings, from their
circulation in Der Spiegel, for instance, may have understood that the broadcast was
showing Pop’s critique of, and implication in, the culture industry. Amid the Bremen
broadcasts, in 1966, the television station that was airing many of them programmed a
documentary on American Pop art.
393
The show inadvertently conveyed how both Pop
and televised images, in this case televised images of Pop, are pixilated and fragmented,
operating on the principles of the snapshot and the anecdote. These qualities were
amplified by the quick scene changes in Bremen productions.
According to the American historian Daniel Boorstin, however, this visual
fragmentation did not necessarily reveal the apparatus of illusion, as in the V-effect.
Rather, as Boorstin wrote in 1961, “The fragmentation of experience was increased by
the invention of television, when a viewer could turn the knob at will and enter programs
one after another free of charge, seeing only a piece of each.”
394
These concerns about
television were already present in the simultaneous nearness and distance in Spring’s
Awakening, the incongruent scale of Pop backdrop and live actor in The Robbers, and the
jarring experience of following the longer narrative arcs of The Un-advised through
dozens of fragmentary scenes. In the 1960s the televisual format, like Heartfield’s
projections dating back to the 1920s, provoked these reactions of disdain and utopian
thinking side by side.
This response to new technologies within a broad sphere of culture and
entertainment, which resembles the German responses to Pop art, also manifested

393
The program was aired in October 1966 over the Dritte Fernsehprogramm des WDR
(Third Television Program of the West German Radio). See Dossin 104.
394
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York:
Vintage Books, 1992 [1961]), 129.
182
tensions between the United States and West Germany. This transatlantic relationship,
already at issue in the Bremen adaptations of American Pop, took a central role in
German debates over television. Magnifying the lingering Weimar-era anxieties over
Americanization, broadcasting companies from the United States were able to undercut
German ones for airtime in the 1950s and 1960s.
395
Hollywood Westerns like Bonanza
as well as classics like Lassie became central features of popular culture for the German
television-viewing public.
396
In 1965 Eckert cautioned that Europe was in danger of
becoming the “television foothills of America.”
397
The Theater Bremen broadcasts
inverted this cultural imperialism issuing from across the Atlantic by appropriating a
visual vocabulary developed by American Pop artists and re-introducing it to a television
audience as part of German theater history. On stage and screen, the Pop-based set pieces
became linked to classical German dramatists like Schiller in addition to the film star
Tushingham, and New York-based Pop artists.
This was another result of Zadek and Minks’ unconventional model of authorship.
Fassbinder, who came to Bremen to collaborate with Minks and Zadek on theater

395
Michael Geisler, “Transatlantic Reflections: German and American Television,” in
The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1968-1990, ed. Detlef Junker
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 367.
396
Ibid.
397
“So ist Europa trotz seiner Fernsehtradition im Begriff, zu einem Fernsehvorland der
USA zu werden.” Gerhard Eckert, Das Fernsehen in den Ländern Westeuropas
Entwicklung und gegenwärtiger Stand (Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1965), 27.
Reprinted in Jens Ruchatz, “Spiel ohne Grenzen oder grenzenlose Spielerei?
Eurovision—Intervision—Monovision,” in Medienkultur der 60er Jahre:
Diskursgeschichte der Medien nach 1945, Vol. 2, ed. Irmela Schneider, Torsten Hahn,
and Christina Bartz (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003), 144; and in English
translation in Andreas Fickers, “The Birth of Eurovision: Transnational Television as a
Challenge for Europe and Contemporary Media Historiography,” in Andreas Fickers and
Catherine Johnson, ed. Transnational Television History (New York and London:
Routledge, 2013), 24.
183
productions by the end of the 1960s was already involved in a similar project of authorial
obfuscation. Although the first collaboration was to be an adaptation of a classical text by
Fassbinder that Zadek would direct, by the time Fassbinder arrived between 1968 and
1969, Zadek and Minks had a falling out and moved on to other theaters.
398
This was a
change for Fassbinder, from informal Kellertheater (cellar theater) to a major municipal
theater, and Zadek and Minks had paved the way for him there by already overturning the
classical repertory, introducing new visuals and unfamiliar gestures, and causing one
major protest. The New German Cinema (Autorenkino) was institutionalized in the wake
of the Oberhausen Manifesto and until Rainer Werner Fassbinder's death in 1982, there
was a hope that the new cinema would occupy a mutant genre between popular and
avant-garde film.
399
This is the way in which New German Cinema shared aspirations
with both American pop and the Bremen Style.
One brief example will illustrate how the Theater Bremen broadcasts presaged the
New German Cinema’s dream of producing something that was as avant-garde as it was
popular. Fassbinder’s melodrama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) featured
Nicolas Poussin's Midas and Bacchus (1630) as wallpaper in the protagonist’s bedroom.
Scholar Brigitte Peucker describes this as the type of art citations that “both shore up
authorial identity, and empty it out.”
400
Rather than putting Poussin on the screen,
Fassbinder put a style of painting that may have been vaguely recognizable to his

398
David Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Theater als Provokation, trans. Sabine
Bayert (Leipzig: Henschel, 2012).
399
Eric Rentschler, “From new German cinema to the post-wall cinema of consensus,” in
Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), 260-77.
400
Brigitte Peucker, “Un-framing the Image: Theatricality and the Art World of ‘Bitter
Tears,’” in A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peucker (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 368.
184
audience. He turned the painting into decoration and changed its medium from painting
to wallpaper to film. Like the newspaper articles that discussed the use of Pop art on the
Bremen stage, the particular artist appropriated is less important than the way in which it
signifies within a constellation of creators that appear transformed by a new medium.
When The Un-advised, a play about misguided youth in postwar Germany, was
put in dialogue with images based on Wesselmann canvases and Oldenburg sculpture, the
production took on a transatlantic meaning. Imagery that Minks appropriated from these
Pop artists told a parallel story about how the American money that re-started the German
economy after World War II also served to distract Germans from the traces of Nazism in
contemporary politics. When Minks enlarged a photographic portrait of a contemporary
film star as the backdrop for a turn-of-the-century play about moralistic child rearing, his
audience saw the continuation of those problems in relation to popular culture and mass
media. Finally, The Robbers put Schiller’s eighteenth-century script at the service of the
Lichtenstein-inspired backdrop and classical German culture spoke to the present.
It remains unclear whether the view of Pop as unable to deliver on the promises of
aesthetic democracy resonated with Zadek and Minks. Their engagement with Pop art
predated testimonies by Huyssen and others about this shift in opinion and the
appearance of Pop on stage is certainly more complex than embrace versus critique. The
American Pop artists they quoted, in turn, never made clear whether their artistic
practices were meant to critique or celebrate capitalism. Both sets of cultural producers
chose not to say exactly who the subject of their critique was or how deep it ran, and the
very equivocation engendered was itself a political position. By refusing to reproduce a
scene as the script’s author described it, the Pop-art backdrops recast the experience of
185
theatergoing as discursive and political. Bucking the playwrights’ call for specific locales
such as a castle (Schiller), forest (Wedekind), or classroom (Valentin), the stage designs’
insubordination to the scripts echoed a generational attitude to authority figures at large.
As theater historian Richard Riddell reasoned, “Minks gave design a voice and a
power that shocked the staid subscription audiences and excited a generation of design
students.”
401
The use of Pop art on the Bremen stage changed the direction of postwar
theater throughout Western Europe, affording set design a larger role in directing
narrative and offering a counter-narrative. Don Rubin described Minks as, “the most
influential set designer of this period.”
402
This ripple effect issued from Brechtian
strategies of keeping the lights on the audience, from an attitude toward cutting and
pasting images that was still associated with Heartfield, and from Piscator’s itinerant
theater that went out to meet the Proletariat in its own neighborhood.
As the recent turn in scholarship toward international and global histories of Pop
suggests, the thread that unifies the many contexts in which Pop developed is more than
surface-level appearance. Global Pop art is also based on the recognition of shared
methods of recycling images through a range of media and the opening up of authorship
to allow for visual re-use across national boundaries and seas. Looking back to
Heartfield’s montages of film footage, and looking forward to the next two chapters, the
legacy of epic theater that was becoming established on West German stages not only
dramaturgical but also a visual mode of destabilizing images through cropping, re-
printing, and televising.

401
Richard Riddell argues, “Espousing a strange form of realism, Minks gave design a
voice and a power that shocked the staid subscription audiences and excited a generation
of design students.” See “The German ‘Raum.’” The Drama Review 24.1 (1980): 40.
402
Don Rubin, The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre (1994), 389.
186
Images to Chapter 2

FIG 1. Wilfried Minks and Peter Zadek, Henry the Hero, Bremen, 1964

FIG 2. Wilfried Minks and Peter Zadek, The Un-advised, Bremen, 1965
187

FIG 3. Wilfried Minks and Peter Zadek, The Un-advised, Bremen, 1965

FIG 4. Installation view, Green Gallery, New York, 1962
188

FIG 5. Works by Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist at Galerie
Sonnabend, Paris, 1963
189

FIG 6. Wilfried Minks and Peter Zadek, The Un-advised, Bremen, 1965

190

FIG 7. Tom Wesselmann in his studio with Great American Nude #54, New York, 1964

191

FIG 8. Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #60, 1973

FIG 9. Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #34, 1963
192

FIG 10. Tom Wesselmann, Landscape #5, 1965

FIG 11. Wilfried Minks and Peter Zadek, Spring’s Awakening, Bremen, 1965
193

FIG 12. Wilfried Minks and Peter Zadek, Spring’s Awakening, Bremen, 1965

FIG 13. Still of Rita Tushingham in Girl with Green Eyes, 1964
194

FIG 14. Waiguo xiju, 外國戲劇, Vol. 2 (1981): 81.

FIG 15. Wilfried Minks and Peter Zadek, The Robbers, Bremen, 1966
195

FIG 16. Roy Lichtenstein, CRAK!, lithograph, 48.9 x 70.2 cm, 1963
FIG 17. Star Spangled War Stories No. 102, Apr-May 1962, D.C. Comics

FIG 18. “American grenadier shoots at Vietcong: Der Spiegel 47.20 (14 Nov 1966)

196

FIG 19. Filming The Un-advised, Theater Bremen, 1965

197

FIG 20. Peter Zadek, film still from I’m an Elephant, Madame, 1969

FIG 21. Peter Zadek, film still from I’m an Elephant, Madame, 1969
198
Chapter 3
“Big Brother is Watching”: Wolf Vostell’s Hamlet in Cologne

In February 1979, the Schauspiel Köln (Cologne, West Germany) staged William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet with lighting, sets, and costumes designed by the artist Wolf
Vostell (1932-1998).
403
Vostell, who had never before worked as a set designer, flooded
the stage with electronic gadgets and surveillance equipment. The director who
commissioned the designs, Hansgünther Heyme (b 1935), studied and worked under
Piscator for a decade, beginning in the 1950s.
404
Heyme is regarded as having developed
a new political theater that revived and built upon on Piscator’s Weimar-era legacy.
405

Heyme’s engagement with Vostell’s electronic imaging technologies enabled him to
revisit a notion of the alert spectator that Piscator pioneered with Heartfield fifty years
earlier. For Vostell and the critics who wrote about his Hamlet design, the commission
was also an opportunity to process the violence and surveillance technologies that were
debated in West Germany in the late 1970s. While historians of theater and multi-media

403
The production ran for thirty nights in Cologne and subsequently traveled to Stuttgart.
According to Hansgünther Heyme and the Vostell Archive the whereabouts of the set
pieces are unknown. Phone conversation with Josefa Cortés Morillo, managing director
of the Wolf Vostell Archive, Malpartida de Cáceres, Spain, on June 30, 2015. Email
exchange with Hansgünther Heyme August 5-6, 2015.
404
Heyme worked with the dramaturge Peter Kleinschmidt, who knew that then-Berlin-
based Vostell had previously lived in Cologne, and suggested Heyme approach Vostell
about being artistic director for Hamlet. Heiner Stachelhaus, “Kein medialer Schock: Zu
Wolf Vostells Kölner Hamlet-Bühne,” Neue Rhein-Zeitung (27 Feb 1979) in TWS.
405
Don Rubin writes, “this new political theatre was triggered – as it had been in the
Weimar Republic – by Erwin Piscator and was developed and continued by Peter
Palitzsch (b. 1918), who left the Berliner Ensemble in 1961 to come to the west where he
spread the principles of Brechtian political theatre, and by Hansgünther Heyme (b. 1935),
a pupil of Piscator’s.” See The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, Vol. 1:
Europe (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1994), 344.
199
performance have mentioned this production briefly in survey texts, it has not been
considered within Vostell’s larger practice, as a contribution to the history of postwar
art.
406
An art-historical account of this collaboration shows how Brechtian aesthetics were
also constitutive for the major postwar artistic forms with which Vostell was involved,
including Happenings, video art, the international network called Fluxus, and Nouveau
Réalisme (new realism).
One of the first pages in the program booklet Vostell designed for Hamlet
demonstrates the artist’s commitment to the legacy of epic theater with an excerpt from
Brecht’s 1940 sonnet “On Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet” (“Über Shakespeares Stück
Hamlet”).
407
Vostell equipped the actors with transistor radios, cassette recorders,
calculators, and mini televisions. The main element of the design was an iron curtain,
hanging about ten feet from the edge of the stage with eighteen television monitors
positioned along the bottom (fig. 1). While referencing the “Iron Curtain” separating

406
Texts that mention the production in passing are J. Lawrence Gunter and Andrew M.
McLean, ed., Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theater Practice in the
German Democratic Republic (University of Delaware Press, 1998); Günter Berghaus,
Avant-garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic technologies (Hampshire, UK and
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 189; Peter Simhandl, Bildertheater: Bildende
Künstler des 20. Jahrhunderts als Theaterreformer (Berlin: Gadegast, 1993), 91; and a
more sustained discussion in Maik Hamburger, “Shakespeare on Stage in the German
Democratic Republic” in Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 275-82.
407
Vostell used the stanzas: “At that his too, too solid flesh sees red. / He feels he’s
hesitated long enough. / It’s time to turn to (bloody) deeds instead.” See “Über
Shakespeares Stück Hamlet” [1940], trans. John Willett, in Bertolt Brecht, Poems, ed.
John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975); reprinted in Maria
Elisa Montironi, “The Introspective Sponger: Hamlet in the Poetry of Bertolt Brecht,”
New Readings 12 (2012): 25. Brecht used the sonnet form, with which Shakespeare is
closely associated, to mock the way Nazi ideaologues instrumentalized Hamlet to justify
the image of the brave Nazi soldier. See Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German
Stage (1998), 157; and Rodney Symington, The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare:
Cultural Politics in the Third Reich (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005).
200
West Germany from East Germany, this iron stage curtain also recalled the blade of a
guillotine, with television monitors in place of severed heads.
408
The production took
place a full two decades after Vostell’s first explorations of television as a sculptural
medium, but the politics of television watching in divided Germany became more, not
less, intense in the intervening period. East Germany had gained a reputation already in
the early 1960s of producing the best cultural television programs in the Eastern Bloc, but
by the late 1970s, a majority of East Germans nevertheless tuned in to West German
programming.
409
Around 1968 television art began offering actual programming content,
not only using the physical box set as a sculptural element. Throughout these two decades
Germans on both sides of the Wall weighed the television’s aspirations to democratic
access against its role in turning culture into a commercial industry. Accounting for both
views, Vostell’s sculptures and Happenings urged participants to demonstrate their
agency over the electronic apparatus.
Whereas in Shakespeare’s script, Hamlet stabs Polonius from behind a curtain,
Vostell and Heyme replaced swordplay with fatal electric shocks simulated by the

408
According to Vostell’s wife, Mercedes Guardado Olivenza Vostell, “The problem of
the construction and demolition of the Berlin wall is very present in all [Vostell’s]
work… when it was first constructed, he wanted to leave Germany because he could not
live in such an inhumane country.” Excerpted and translated from “Mercedes Guaradado.
Su Vida Con Wolf Vostell,” interview by Mercedes Guardado Vostell, No Es Un Día
Cualquiera, Corporación de Radio y Televisión Española. May 5, 2013. Radio.
409
It has been suggested that the two countries never entirely separated their signals in
anticipation of eventual reunification. Two rich sources of information on television
broadcasting and watching in a divided Germany are Peter J.S. Dunnett, “Communist
Countries: Watch Big Brother,” in The World Television Industry: An Economic Analysis
(Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 1990), 183-92; and George H. Quester,
“Transboundary Television,” in Before and After the Cold War: Using Past Forecasts to
Predict the Future (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002), 55-80.
201
lightning-flash of spotlights.
410
Shiny, amorphous sculptural pieces on the stage
resembled puddles of blood with shoes, a gas mask, a sword, and other pieces of
equipment affixed to them (fig. 2). On the left edge of the stage, Vostell hung a horse
carcass upside-down, suspended by rope, dripping a blood-like substance into a chalice.
Near the end of the production, the iron curtain rose to reveal one hundred small
television monitors on top of wooden tables, each playing the news report of that
particular day (fig. 3). The production was timed to coincide with the nightly news
broadcast so that the audience was hearing breaking news for the first time, superimposed
onto Shakespeare’s script, creating uncanny continuities between the condensed time of
the play and the contemporary world outside.
411
For the final scene, Vostell replaced
Shakespeare’s poisoned blades, potions, and duels with an enormous flash of light and
overwhelming sound coming from the television monitors, as the actors flailed about on
stretchers in an electronic-media death chamber. Ophelia reappeared in the role of the
invading Fortinbras, dressed as an astronaut with a helmet and mirrored discs covering
his/her body and walked toward a bright light accompanied by Robert Schumann's
Eichendorff-Liederkreis. The daily news broadcast and an uproar of static interference

410
Following this analysis will require some familiarity with the main events of
Shakespeare’s script. Very briefly: the protagonist is Prince Hamlet of Denmark, a
character whose sanity is challenged by appearances of his deceased father’s ghost. The
late King Hamlet died at the hands of his brother, Claudius, who crowned himself and
married the King’s widow and Prince Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. In plotting to avenge
his father’s murder and his mother’s incestuous nuptials, Prince Hamlet goes after his
uncle Claudius but along the way accidentally murders Claudius’ counselor, Polonius,
which incites Polonius’ son, Laertes, to plot Hamlet’s death. Polonius’ disillusioned
daughter, Ophelia, commit suicide. Laertes stabs Hamlet immediately after Hamlet
fatally stabs Laertes and Claudius. Gertrude dies by drinking poison intended for Hamlet.
The invading Fortinbras arrives on the scene of the bloodbath and claims the crown.
411
Vostell’s wife recalled, “I was always afraid the televisions would turn on before they
got to the final scene.” Conversation with Mercedes Guardado Olivenza Vostell on July
16, 2015 in Madrid.
202
finally completely drowned out Shakespeare’s words.
412

Grappling with the meaning of such a profusion of electronic devices on stage,
one critic from a Cologne newspaper wrote:
It would seem, most reasonably, that [Heyme] deployed video and transistor
technology as symbols for the total surveillance state, where everyone spies on
another, as indeed actually happens in Shakespeare's play: in the production one
truly finds something of Orwell's vision in 1984 (motto: ‘Big Brother is watching
you’)... the streaming televisions and transistors are harmful to the intellect, are a
modern form of barbarism, which is practiced extensively in Hamlet with its
many corpses.
413

The nearly one hundred reviews of Hamlet describe reactions among the audience that
were various and extreme. One critic noticed “vigorous responses for and against, and
some silent opposition by visitors who walked out early.”
414
As the curtains closed on
opening night, a man cried “outrageous!”
415
Several more critics described “a chorus of

412
The song was “Mondnacht” in a recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. See Jochen
Schmidt, “Hamlet und der Terror der Medien” (1979) in TWS.
413
“Am einleuchtendsten wäre noch gewesen, wenn er [Heyme] die Video- und
Transistorentechnik nur eingesetzt hätte als Symbol für den totalen Überwachungsstaat,
wo jeder jeden bespitzelt, wie es ja in Shakespeares Stück tatsächlich geschieht: Etwas
von der Vision à la Orwells ‘1984’ (Mooto [typo in original]: ‘Big Brother ist watching
you’ - Der großer Bruder paßt auf) findet man denn auch wirklich in seiner
Inszenierung... Fernsehen und Transistoren-Berieselung sind schädlich für den Intellekt,
sind eine moderne Form der Barbarei, wie sie im Hamlet auch ausgiebig und mit vielen
Leichen praktiziert wird” Hans Joachim Schyle, “Ein voll elektronischer Shakespeare
von Heyme und Vostell: Der Kölner Hamlet hinkt den Medien nach: Buhkonzert für die
Abschiedspremiere des Schauspielintendanten,” Kölner Stadt Anzeiger 42.5 (19 Feb
1979) in TWS.
414
“...erregte beim Publikum heftiges Pro und Kontra und auch viel stummen
Widerspruch durch vorzeitig das Theater verlassende Besucher.” Sonja Luyken,
“Plädoyer gegen den Bildschirmterror: Heyme und Vostell erarbeiteten am Kölner
Schauspiel eine ungewöhnliche 'Hamlet'-Version,” Weser-Kurier, Bremen (26 Feb 1979)
in ibid.
415
“‘Unverschämtheit!’ – rief laut ein Mann im Parkett, sofort nach Schluß. Andere
applaudierten begeistert (oder buhten empört).” Hannes Schmidt, “‘Hamlet’ als Vostell-
Happening in Köln: Ophelia verschenkt Kasetten-Rekrder,” Neue Ruhr-Zeitung (19 Feb
1979) in ibid.
203
booers.”
416
The Vostell/Heyme production was the fourth maverick Hamlet in West
Germany within a single year.
417
It was not their unorthodox interpretation of a hallowed
text that critics found exceptional, but the visual and aural intrusion of new technologies
on stage.
For many of the theater critics, Vostell’s roving television camera, picking up live
feed throughout the production, exploited an unease surrounding surveillance or
Überwachung, “watching over” (fig. 4). West Germany was founded in 1949 on the
principle of democracy and prided itself on its values of liberalism, representation, and
openness. Up until roughly the time of the Hamlet production, it benefited from
comparisons to the Nazi regime and especially East Germany’s state police and
espionage programs.
418
By the 1970s, however, West Germans began to worry about the
threat of information technology, or “computerization.”
419
Largely as a result of the
government’s attempts to anticipate the attacks of the RAF and protests staged by the
new social movements, the few years immediately before and after the 1979 Hamlet were
the most intense in West Germany’s history in terms of innere Sicherheit or “internal

416
“Ein Buh-Konzert zum Ende…” in “Elektro-Hamlet,” Berliner Zeitung (19 Feb 1979);
Ingeborg Schader, “Verunstaltetes Kunstwerk: Buh-Chöre für elektronischen ‘Hamlet’ in
Köln,” Münstersche Zeitung (19 Feb 1979); and “Skandal um Heymes Hamlet:
Schauspiel Köln: Viel Lärm um Shakespeares Tragödie,” Express, Köln (19 Feb 1979) in
ibid.
417
Peter Zadek staged Hamlet in Bochum (1977), George Tabori in Bremen (1978), and
Hans Neuenfels in Hamburg (1978). The critic Hans-Joachim Schyle described these
productions as “sensuous clowning,” “psychoanalytic nightmare shocker,” and
“flirtatious farce,” respectively. See “Hamlet im elektronischen Korsett: Köln:
Hansgünther Heyme und Wolf Vostell errichten eine Fernsehlandschaft um
Shakespeare,” Frankfurter Neue Presse (23 Feb 1979) in TWS.
418
Quinn Slobodian, “The Opaque State: Surveillance and Deportation in the
Bundesrepublik,” German Studies Review 38.2 (May 2015): 394.
419
Ola Svenonius, “Video Surveillance in a Historical Perspective,” in Video
Surveillance and Social Control in a Comparative Perspective, ed. Fredrika Björklund
and Ola Svenonius (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 75.
204
security.”
420
Coinciding with the expansion of video art and closed-circuit video
technology in the mid-1970s, West German police surveillance methods developed in a
legal grey area, of which Vostell and Heyme were highly skeptical.
421

Among Hamlet’s reviewers, the electronics on stage registered anxieties about
espionage programs, the distortion of political by media outlets, and the mechanical
simulation of reality. Such readings of video art in particular were more politicized than
those of art critics writing about these media in terms of the viewer’s body and
phenomenological experience in the gallery.
422
The critic quoted above was not alone in
admitting his initial lack of familiarity with the use of electronic media in contemporary
art by Vostell, and his contemporaries such as David Lamelas, Joan Jonas, and Nam June
Paik. As in the previous chapter, theater critics offered new insights into Happenings,
Fluxus, and Vostell’s “décollage” largely because of their lack of previous exposure.
In the twenty-first century, the incorporation of this kind of new media into scenic
design has become commonplace.
423
In 2007, the Wooster Group in New York re-

420
Ibid.
421
Larry Frohman describes the increasing use of surveillance among the West German
police force from 1974 to 1977, including the systematic surveillance of anyone who
visited or corresponded with those accused of terrorism, computer mapping systems of
such suspects, passive observation (beobachtende Fahndung) of those individuals during
police encounters and border crossings, and undercover informants. See “Datenschutz,
the Defense of Law, and the Debate over Precautionary Surveillance: The Reform of
Police Law and the Changing Parameters of State Action in West Germany,” German
Studies Review 38.2 (May 2015): 308-9.
422
For example, Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, “The Observed Eye, or Making Seeing
Visible (On the video works of Dan Graham)” [1960s] in Dan Graham, ed. Gloria Moure
(Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), 191; and Max Imdahl, Bildautonomie und
Wirklichkeit: Zur theoretischen Begründung moderner Malerei (Mittenwald: Maeander-
Kunstverlag, 1981). See also Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and
the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 50.
423
Although somewhat outside the scope of these stage examples, scholars have also
discussed the use of new media in film and television adaptations of Shakespeare since
205
enacted an iconic 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet in front of a simultaneous film
screening of the historical production, creating a shadow effect between the live and
electronically reproduced actors (fig. 5).
424
Rebecca Schneider described it as, “a queasy
reiteration in which the live actors appear ghost-like and the filmic actors appear oddly
reenlivened across the undecidable interstices of their cross-temporal mimesis.”
425
In
2008 the Berlin director Thomas Ostermeier also staged the ghostly aspect of Hamlet,
projecting live video feed as Vostell had three decades before. In these more recent
productions, though, the electronic imaging devices that appear on stage are taken by
critics and scholars to be merely the “apparatus of modern theatricality,” not as the art
world’s contribution to theater.
426
They rarely garnered the political, Brechtian readings
that Vostell’s design did.
Given Vostell’s already diverse range of activities spanning the entire Cold War
period, few art histories that include Vostell acknowledge his months-long electronic

the 1990s, in projects such as Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995), Baz Luhrmann’s
Romeo + Juliet (1996), and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000). See Elsie Walker,
“Getting Back to Shakespeare: Whose Film is it Anyway?” in Diana E. Henderson, ed., A
Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2006), 21. See also Peter S. Donaldson, “Hamlet among the Pixelvisionaries:
Video, Art, Authenticity, and ‘Wisdom’ in Almereyda’s Hamlet,” in Diana E. Henderson,
ed., A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Malden, MA and Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 216-37; Russell Jackson, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Shakespeare on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Judith
Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Abington, UK and New York: Routledge, 2014).
424
See Pioty Woycicki, Post-Cinematic Theatre and Performance (Hampshire, UK and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 115-27.
425
Rebecca Schneider, Performance Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical
Reenactment (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2011), 16. Italics in original.
426
W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), 151.
206
Hamlet project.
427
Vostell is generally written about as a contributor to the development
of video art and Happenings—a collaborator of his more famous colleagues in those
fields, Paik and Allan Kaprow—and as a participant in Fluxus events in Germany and
Nouveau Réalisme in France. When his Hamlet design is mentioned in art historical
sources, it is used as an example of a video-installation, and in theater studies as an
example of the revisionist practices of Director’s Theater. Although a sidelined work
within the history of postwar art, this production nevertheless has much to say about the
way Brechtian aesthetics were able to make Vostell’s use of media politically
comprehensible.

“Theater is in the Streets”: Décollage in France and Germany

After studying lithography and printmaking at the Werkkunstschule in Wuppertal
from 1954 to 1955, Vostell studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in
Paris between 1955 and 1956. Following this short but formative period in Paris, he
returned to Germany to enroll at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1956 to
1957.
428
In addition to artistic networks associated with the terms Fluxus and
Happenings, Vostell was peripherally involved with the Paris-based group, Nouveau
Réalisme. “Décollage”—a gesture of visual appropriation through the destruction of

427
See Jürgen Becker and Wolf Vostell, Eds., Happenings: fluxus, pop art, nouveau
réalisme: eine Dokumentation (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965); André de Rache,
ed., POP ART: Nieuwe Figuratie, Nouveau Réalisme (Brussels: Casino Communal,
1970).
428
See Alistair Hicks, Mary Findlay, Friedhelm Hütte, Art Works: British and German
Contemporary Art 1960-2000 (London: Merrell Publishers and Deutsche Bank AG
London, 2011), n.p.
207
found images—is the term with which Vostell is most closely related in the literature, yet
it is one that Nouveau Réaliste artists were using first, and to refer to markedly different
politics of image-making than Vostell’s.
Outside of the small but growing literature on Vostell, the term “décollage” more
commonly describes the torn posters of the affichistes, Raymond Hains and Jacques de la
Villeglé, both of whom were signatories of the 1960 Nouveau Réalisme manifesto.
429

Kaira Cabañas explains that, “the artists’ act of tearing off the posters from the walls on
which they were originally mounted, a subtractive procedure…has led to the description
of their work as décollage, deriving from ‘dé-coller’ or to un-glue.”
430
The surrealist Léo
Malet in fact coined the term “décollage” in the 1930s and the affichistes adopted it for a
body of work begun in 1949.
431
In addition to this surrealist origin, the affichistes’
interrogation of the urban environment built upon activities of the inchoate Internationale

429
Sidney Simon, “Wolf Vostell’s Action Imagery,” Art International 12.9 (Nov 1968):
41; Jörn Merkert, “Pre-Fluxus Vostell,” Art and Artists 8 (May 1973): 32; Claudia
Mesch, “Vostell’s Ruins: Dé-collage and the Mnemotechnic Space of the Postwar City,”
Art History 23.1 (2000): 95; Faye Ran, A History of Installation Art and the Development
of New Art Forms: Technology and the Hermeneutics of Time and Space in Modern and
Postmodern Art from Cubism to Installation (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 185. Pierre
Restany, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel
Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques de la Villeglé officially formed Nouveaux Réalisme
with the signing of Restany’s manifesto in October 1960. See Kaira Cabañas, The Myth
of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2013), 1.
430
Villeglé and Hains titled this first décollage based on the words visible in it, Ach Alma
Manétro (Feb 1949). See Kaira Cabañas, “Poster Archaeology,” in Jacques Villeglé, ed.
François Bon and Nicolas Bourriaud, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion and
New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 76.
431
Hannah Feldman described the narrative according to which Hains and Villeglé
discovered décollage in December 1949. After walking past an accumulation of posters,
cut or ripped from a wooden construction barrier in illegal acts of vandalism, they
removed a selection and fixed it to canvas. See “Of the Public Born: Raymond Hains and
La France déchirée,” October 108 (Spring 2004): 73. The Malet reference in Benjamin
Buchloh, “From Detail to Fragment: Décollage Affichiste,” October 56 (Spring 1991):
103-05.
208
Situationniste (SI). François Dufrêne, the third member of the affichistes, participated in
the SI forerunner, the Internationale Lettriste (Letterist International).
432
As mentioned in
the first chapter, Brecht’s 1954 Berliner Ensemble tour to Paris provided a model for
détournement, which, in the spirit of décollage, also appropriated and re-signified
elements of the urban surrounding.
433
Explaining the overlap and variance in Vostell’s
conception of décollage and Parisian projects under the same name, particularly as both
prefigured American Pop, will go a long way toward offering a framework for theatrical
appropriations of contemporary art in West Germany. In the 1950s Vostell’s politics of
décollage had not yet come into focus with those of Brechtian defamiliarization, as they
would on the Hamlet stage in 1979, but the historical conditions to which both responded
were present in the streets of 1950s Paris. Although Vostell had no training in theater, his
application of “décollage” techniques to the stage allowed Heyme to revisit the moment
in theater history in the 1920s, when Piscator and Heartfield first combined live and
electronically simulated bodies on stage in an effort to politicize their audiences.
Vostell purportedly first saw the word “décollage” in a French newspaper in
1954, referring to a passenger aircraft that cashed almost immediately upon liftoff.
434

Vostell drew further inspiration from the dictionary definition for the French word:
“loosen, unglue, start, ascend from the ground (airplane), separate, go away, die
[pejorative form of abkratzen, literally ‘scrape off’].” He often punctuated the word, “dé-

432
In 1953 Dufrêne broke with the Lettriste group, which became the SI in 1957. See
Buchloh, “From Detail to Fragment” (1991): 103-05.
433
Kaira Cabañas draws out similarities in these projects of semantic re-signification as
well as the differences in their politics in The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme (2013), 90-93.
434
Wolf Vostell, “Das Bewuβtsein der dé-coll/age” in Happening und Leben (Neuwied:
Hermann Luchterhand, 1970), 198; Mesch, “Vostell’s Ruins” (2000): 95; and Wolf
Vostell, dé-coll/age happenings, Laura P. Williams, trans. (New York: Something Else
Press, 1966), 90.
209
coll/age,” as he found it in the dictionary. Whether or not it is true, his claim to have
come upon the term independently of the affichistes reflects an insouciant attitude toward
authorship consistent with his appropriation of found objects and the cutting and pasting
operations of décollage.
The relationship between Vostell and the affichistes remains vague in the
literature. Brandon Taylor describes Vostell’s encounter with the newspaper clipping in
1954 on his first trip to Paris as a revelation for the young artist, “with or without
knowledge of the Parisian affichistes.”
435
They would later be included in group
exhibitions, such as the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart’s 1971 “Dufrêne, Hains, Rotella, Villeglé,
Vostell: Plakatabrisse aus der Sammlung Cremer” but in the mid-1950s they had little
contact. Whereas Hains and Villeglé’s torn posters referred to the fiercely debated
decolonization of Algeria—formally, in their tattered condition, and politically, in the
content of the posters—Vostell’s décollages were more often sculptures, installations, or
Happenings that used this aesthetic of destruction and vandalism to address topics of
recent and contemporary German history, not the French-Algerian War.
436
Vostell
explained: “Torn posters were my first dé-coll/ages, and as I was demonstrating the dé-
coll/age principle in action it became an event, and out of these events grew my first dé-
coll/age happenings.”
437

435
Brandon Tayler, ed., Urban Walls: A Generation of Collage in Europe and America
(New York and Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2008), 20.
436
Poster ripping in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s not by any means a practic
that referred exclusively to French politics. See, for example Germano Celant, Mimmo
Rotella, 1944-1961: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1 (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2016).
437
Wolf Vostell, “Genesis and Iconography of My Happenings,” in Miss Vietnam and
Texts of Other Happenings, trans. Carl Weissner (San Francisco: The Nova Broadcast
Press, 1968), 4.
210
Because décollage is premised on a notion of borrowing imagery without
attributing authorship, its practitioners were not always properly credited, a phenomenon
that is most clear in the scholarly elision of Vostell and the affichistes despite significant
differences in their aesthetic and political aims. Trying to smooth over the concurrence of
these different conceptions of “décollage,” the performance scholar Nick Kaye writes,
“Vostell’s early work had a clear affinity with affichiste and junk art by artists such as
Raymond Hains and John Chamberlain.”
438
Monica Kjellman-Chaplin also
oversimplifies the politics of the affichistes and Vostell: “The German artist Wolf Vostell
was also doing similar work at the same time that Rotella and the Nouveaux Réalistes
were exploring the potentialities of décollage.”
439
Suzanne Neuburger claims, “of the
artists in Cologne, it was without a doubt Wolf Vostell who, by his attitude but also
because of the poster ripping workgroup [the affichistes], was closest to the group
[Nouveau Réalisme]. Yet despite this, his membership was to fail due to Restany’s
rejection.”
440
Neuburger is pointing out that Vostell was an important connector between
two distinct artistic groups in France and Germany that were otherwise not in contact.
Some of Vostell’s collaborators in the United States, to whom he introduced the
term décollage, also seem to have been unaware that he was not the first to use it. The
Fluxus artist and nihilist philosopher, Henry Flynt, for instance, wrote, “in 1962… at the
same time as [George] Maciunas was circulating these proposals,” for “post-Cage

438
Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London and
New York: Routledge, 2000), 115.
439
Monica Kjellman-Chaplin, “Traces, Layers, Palimpsests: The Dialogics of Collage
and Pastiche,” Kunsthistorik tidskrift/Journal of Art History 75.2 (2006): 87.
440
Suzanne Neuburger, “Cologne, Nouveau Réalisme and the Hahn Collection: From
Citytour to ‘Postal Event’: the Project Design Cityrama II,” in Suzanne Neuburger, ed.,
Nouveau Réalisme (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien and
Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2005), 12.
211
concerts and for the publication of annual anthologies…Wolf Vostell began making
décollage.”
441
In Allan Kaprow’s notes for a 1963 lecture on Pop art at the Jewish
Museum in New York, he wrote a passage about the nostalgia of “Villeglé’s tattered
posters” and then, in the margin, inserted “Hains’ and Vostell’s” as well.
442
I will detail
below how Vostell’s project of décollage differed from the affichistes, but it is also
important to note that critics and artists abroad in the early 1960s elided the aesthetics of
Pop art and various practices of tearing posters with Vostell’s peculiar derivation of a
term the affichistes first used to refer to their own mode of appropriation.
Vostell’s first “décollage-Happening” in 1958 was an elaborate participatory
event in Paris titled, Tour of Vanves: Theater is in the Street (Tour de Vanves. Theater ist
auf der Strasse).
443
In a student-populated section of Paris’ Rive Gauche, Vostell
entreated passersby to read from ripped posters.
444
Vostell also supplied a score that
called for specific actions but instructed the participants not to agree on how to carry out
those actions, leaving open a wide variety of outcomes. In the second part of the
performance, which remained unrealized, participants would have been asked to
permanently fix refuse from automobile accidents to the sites where the accidents
occurred, thereby eventually making impossible future traffic, and by extension traffic

441
Henry Flynt, “Mutations of the Vanguard Pre-Fluxus, During Fluxus, Late Fluxus,” in
Ubi Fluxus ibi motus 1990-1962, ed. Gino DiMaggio (Milan: Mazzotta, 1990). Reprinted
in John Held, Jr., Small Scale Subversion: Mail Art and Artistamps (Breda, The
Netherlands: TAM Publishing, 2015), 91.
442
Handwritten manuscript of Allan Kaprow’s 1963 New York lecture on “Pop Art” in
the Caroline Lerner Goldsmith papers related to Allan Kaprow, 1963-1984, AAA.
443
Although Vostell’s definition of a “décollage-Happening” changed frequently and
scholars have disagreed on which event was Vostell’s “first” Happening, the archival
evidence suggests it was on Theater is in the Street. This is also Ina Conzen’s conclusion
in Art Games: Die Schachteln der Fluxuskünstler, Sohm Dossier 1 (Stuttgart:
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Oktagon, 1997), 149.
444
For further details of the Happening, see Mesch, “Vostell’s Ruins” (2000): 89.
212
accidents. Vostell employed the term “theater” here in the broader sense that other event-
based artists and choreographers would use the term in the 1960s. His wife Mercedes
recounted that, “For Vostell, theater was in the streets. He never went to the theater. He
thought it was ridiculous, unnatural.”
445
It was unnatural because following a script left
little room for improvisation and impulsive reactions. Hamlet, she explained, was “more
like an exhibition or a Happening than a theater piece.”
446
Ironically, Vostell’s plan to
align the final scene with one hundred televisions on timers, which would turn on to play
the live news broadcast each night, made it absolutely necessary not to deviate from the
script. That theater was not an avant-garde medium for Vostell makes the aesthetic
politics of his 1979 stage design all the more intriguing. Some critics believed he
capitulated to the bourgeois institution of theater but, by his own account, Hamlet
constituted an attempt to redefine that institution’s customs of staging and spectating.
Vostell’s scripts for décollage-Happenings entail obstructing, shooting at, and
burying electronics such as the television and tape recorder.
447
He tried to prove to his
participants that they had control over these mass-produced devices. Perhaps the most
explicit demonstration of the relation between Vostell’s concept of décollage and German
history is his Black Room (Schwarzes Zimmer), a three-part work completed in 1958 and
installed in a darkened room (fig. 6a-c). The first, Auschwitz Floodlight 568 (Auschwitz-
Scheinwerfer 568), is a floodlight from the infamous concentration camp and
programmed to flash on periodically, shocking viewers who happen to be standing in the

445
Conversation with Mercedes Guardado Olivenza Vostell on July 16, 2015 in Madrid.
446
Ibid.
447
Günter Berghaus, “Happenings in Europe: Trends, Events, and Leading Figures,” in
Happenings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen R. Sanford (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995), 99.
213
way of the strong glare (fig. 6a). By catching unassuming museum visitors in the bright
light, Vostell placed them in the subject-position of exposed prisoners. The second
pedestal, German View (Deutscher Ausblick), features a television encased in wood and
covered with barbed wire, tin, newspaper, and bones, so that only a few inches of the
screen are visible (fig. 6b). Taking its name from the extermination camp in Poland, the
final work in the room, Treblinka, consists of a transistor radio and a role of film torn out
of a camera (fig. 6c). Art historian Richard Langston noted, “Black Room made clear that
although new forms of technology (like the television) have proliferated in the wake of
genocide, they are in no way impervious to cruel and inhumane uses.”
448
This work gives
a sense of how Vostell extended the affichiste practice of décollage in the direction of
sculpture. The use of found objects, and the paradoxical construction of an object through
an act of vandalism is common to the affichiste work, but Vostell puts these methods in
the service of his interrogation of German history.
Vostell’s interest in applying this tearing of surfaces to television and handheld
electronics further sets him apart from the Paris-based artists. Claudia Mesch has written,
“dé-collage recalls the potential for terror lodged in certain technological commodities. In
the postwar world, the memory of technological destruction, experienced in the landscape
of Vostell’s personal past, was also visible in the present of reconstruction in the ruins
and rubble of the postwar city.”
449
Vostell’s requirement that his participants manipulate

448
See Richard Langston, “The Art of Barbarism and Suffering,” in Stephanie Barron
and Sabine Eckmann, Eds., Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, (Los Angeles: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009) 251.
449
Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War
Germanys (London and New York: Taurus Academic Studies, 2008), 60.
214
technological devices offered opportunities to work through the dehumanizing impact of
electronic communication technologies as a metaphor for postwar trauma.
Vostell nonetheless continued to appropriate torn posters in a manner visually
similar to the affichistes. One of his better-known works, Coca-Cola (1961), is a
décollage of posters on masonite, in which the Coca-Cola advertisement has been ripped
in certain sections to reveal further layers of advertising imagery underneath (fig. 7). Art
historian Benjamin Lima claims that this particular décollage work is “commonly
interpreted to show that the slashed Coca-Cola advertisement was a sign of aggression
directed against a sign of a dominant U.S.-centered commercial culture.”
450
While Hains
and Villeglé were removing sections of torn posters relating to France’s war in Algiers,
Vostell was interrogating the mechanisms of capitalist consumption. Vostell’s work,
however, is more carefully composed than those of the affichistes, who selected segments
of found urban poster collages at random.
451
Peter Ludwig acquired Vostell’s Coca-Cola
décollage for his collection in Cologne, where it hung alongside Andy Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein’s adaptations of advertising imagery and told a story of Americanization
stretching back to Coca-Cola’s 1929 importation to Germany.
452

The development from two-dimensional work to participatory performance-event
has often been historicized as peculiar to the New York school. In 1952, the critic Harold
Rosenberg wrote, “At a certain moment in time, the canvas began to appear to one

450
Lima reads the Coca-Cola emblem as a more complex and essentially German one
given its prominence in debates over culture since the Weimar era. Benjamin Lima, Wolf
Vostell’s Décollage and the Forms of Destruction, 1958-1972 (Diss. Yale University,
2009), 32-33.
451
Benjamin Buchloh, “From Detail to Fragment” (Spring): 108.
452
See Jeff Richard Schutts, Coca-Colonization, ‘Refreshing’ Americanization, or Nazi
Volksgetränk? The History of Coca-Cola in Germany, 1929-1961 (Diss., Georgetown
University, 2004).
215
American painter after another as an arena in which to act… What was to go on the
canvas was not a picture but an event.”
453
Rosenberg described the painter moving
around an “arena,” rather than a proscenium stage. In an arena, spectators are generally
seated in the round and are thus visible to one another as observers and objects of
observation. In Rosenberg’s scenario, however, there is just an artist in his studio, with no
reference to audience.
454
While the action painting, if Rosenberg was correct, was a
visual trace of the artist in motion, Fluxus events and Happenings, like theater, traced the
audience’s experiences as well. Kaprow’s art-historically trained mind ostensibly arrived
at the word “Happening” in 1956 in the midst of writing an article on Jackson Pollock
(published in Art News in 1958).
455
Kaprow built upon Rosenberg’s linear model of the
development from painting to acting.
Vostell was in contact with Kaprow in these years but represents a more blatantly
political origin of the Happening, in which the event grew out of torn posters and the
physical remnants of genocide, war, consumption, and elections, not out of Pollock’s
abstract gesture. German theater historian Peter Simhandl offers a transatlantic
perspective in his history of Fluxus and Happenings (“Aktionskunst” or action art), by
beginning not with Pollock and Kaprow but with the Western European abstract style of

453
Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51.8 (Dec 1952): 22.
454
Hannah Higgins has argued, “the neat characterization of Happenings as developing
linearly from action painting thus fails to account for ‘everything else’: experience
beyond mere artistic reference.” Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2002), 109.
455
See Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57.7 (1958): 24-26, 55-57;
and Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: an Introduction to Happenings,
Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances (New York: The Dial
Press, 1968), 111.
216
painting, Art Informel or tachism, and Yves Klein’s concept of the “living paintbrush.”
456
Vostell’s torn posters of the 1950s also developed into participatory events in the 1960s
and thus offer a specifically Western European lineage of the Happening.
In May 1963 Vostell had an opportunity to present his socially and historically
engaged décollage-Happenings to a North American audience. The Fluxus-organized
Yam Festival consisted of a series of events in New Jersey and New York State; the name
Yam derives from the backward spelling of the month of May, although the festival
activities, including a long-term mail art project, stretched far beyond May’s thirty-one
days.
457
In addition to Vostell, Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Yvonne Rainer, La Monte Young,
and Trisha Brown are some of the other artists who presented works at George Segal’s
farm in New Jersey.
458
Vostell offered a “Television Décollage” that entailed throwing
custard cream pies at running televisions, wrapping the monitors in barbed wire, and
burying them.
459
Those present included some of the most vocal practitioners of Fluxus—
including George Brecht and Higgins—and Pop, such as Warhol and Segal.
460
At this
point, several years into Fluxus’ existence and an early juncture in Pop art’s
development, such overlap between Fluxus and Pop was not particularly strange among

456
Simhandl, Bildertheater (1993), 86-89. See also Gail Levin, “Action Painting:
Perspectives from Two Sides of the Atlantic,” Art Journal 67.4 (Winter 2008): 119-21.
457
Robert Watts explained the mail art component in 1964: “In effect this was a mailing
to an audience, sometimes randomly chosen, of an assortment of things. Some were event
cards… others were objects of food, pencils, soap, photos, actions, words, facts,
statements, declarations, puzzles, etc.” Robert Watts in Ubi Fluxus ibi motus (1990), 280.
Reprinted in Held, Small Scale Subversion (2015), 92.
458
“Smolin Gallery announcement of Yam Festival Happenings at George Siegel’s farm,
1963” in Caroline Lerner Goldsmith papers related to Allan Kaprow, 1963-1984, AAA.
459
Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1983), 131. Chris Salter, Entangled: The Technology and the
Transformation of Performance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 122.
460
María del Mar Lozano Bartolozzi, Wolf Vostell: 1932-1998 (Hondarribia, Spain:
Editorial NEREA, 2000), 25, 32.
217
transatlantic artists who were invested in transformations of consumer objects and
confrontations in the social sphere.
Vostell’s idiosyncratic display at the Yam Festival demonstrates his unique
position between Pop, Nouveau Réalisme, and Fluxus, but also between the United States
and Europe, and between the creation of objects and actions. Historians have
subsequently drawn out these distinctions, but they were not concrete for Vostell at the
time. Those wishing to accentuate the differences between Pop art and Fluxus often
compare Warhol with Joseph Beuys, who also collaborated with Vostell.
461
Donald
Kuspit, for example, wrote of a cultural Cold War in which “Warhol is on one side,
Beuys on the other.”
462
Both, however, cultivated celebrity personae that were
inextricable from their artistic output and assimilated audiences that might not have been
involved in the fine arts. Warhol was involved in the production of celebrity portraits,
popular music, storefront windows, and large-scale public commissions such as his
murals for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Beuys opened his Düsseldorf Art Academy
classes to the public, staging highly visible spectacles, producing large editions of prints
and multiples, and founding the German Student’s Party in 1967 and the Organization for
Direct Democracy through Referendum in 1971.
463
Vostell’s destabilization of high and
low cultural forms in his Happenings diffuse some of these discursive tensions between

461
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh uses this comparison in “An Interview with Thomas
Hirschhorn,” October 113 (summer 2005): 78. On Beuys’ uneasy relationship with
Fluxus, see Stefan Germer, “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys,” October 45 (Summer 1988):
69. George Maciunas kept a list of “official” Fluxus artists, from which he ultimately
struck Beuys. Beuys nevertheless remained associated with Fluxus artists and is often
included in Fluxus exhibitions.
462
Donald Kuspit, “Beuys or Warhol?” C Magazine (fall 1987), reprinted in The New
Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993): 403-6.
463
Deborah Wye and Wendy Weitman, eds., Eye on Europe: Prints, Books, and
Multiples, 1960 to Now (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 112.
218
Fluxus and Pop art.
464

In 1966 Vostell loosely defined décollage-Happenings as, “staged or improvised
events in which the existing conditions are included / phases and shocks of the present-
day environment not connected to any particular spot but rather to many places / they
usually occur in such places as airports, super-highways, automobile graveyards,
supermarkets, large city garages and stockyards / the observer is either actively drawn
into or alogically included in the unrehearsed event / the course of the happening is
dependent on how he accepts or reacts to the rules of the game.”
465
If this reads like a
spatialized version of Brecht and Piscator’s earlier theories of epic theater, it is because
of the premium Vostell also placed on the individual participant’s role in making
decisions rather than being passively entertained. Participants were given some
instruction but were largely responsible for creating their own understandings of the
experience. Vostell orchestrated nearly thirty major, multi-part Happenings in Europe and
the Americas in the 1960s alone.
Preceding Vostell’s work on Hamlet by nearly a decade, his large-scale
installation, Grasshoppers (Heuschrecken; 1969-1970), offers an insight into both what
décollage looks like in an art object and how he would apply it to the theater stage in
Cologne (fig. 8). This installation is composed of two enlarged photographs, one of a
lesbian couple in the act of making love, and the other of Russian military tanks
suppressing the Prague Spring, sexual liberation and military showmanship, two poles of

464
Vostell also staged events in public squares and universities, made himself
recognizable by wearing peyot (sidelocks typically worn by Orthodox Jewish men), and
went a step further than Beuys’ proclamation that everyone is an artist, declaring,
“Everyone is an artwork.” Wolf Vostell, “Jeder Mensch ein Kunstwerk!” lecture at
Marburg University, 31 October 1979, in Sohm Archive, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
465
Wolf Vostell, dé-coll/age happenings (1966), 90.
219
the Cold War-era. To the side of the images, Vostell positioned a video camera on a tall
tripod, much like the one that rolled around the stage throughout Hamlet, picking up the
faces of viewers and feeding them directly into a row of twenty television monitors along
the floor. In front of the display, he arranged a tribute to the bombing of Dresden, by
embedding large fragments of human skeletons, along with hair and shoes into a sheet of
black, sticky tar.
466
This piece brought the Brechtian implication of the viewer in the
moral universe of the work together with Cold War politics and debates. Johannes
Birringer commented that viewers of Heuschrecken “see themselves as voyeurs who are
complicitous in the production… standing both inside and outside this ‘installation’ yet
faced with the question of moral value and personal responsibility.”
467

The Grasshoppers installation is so politically and visually similar to the stage
Vostell designed for Hamlet, that the stage production allows us a unique view into how
installation art could possibly function alongside a script, and also reminds us that when
one enters such an installation, one becomes an actor on a stage. Vostell’s use of closed
loop video in Hamlet also drew together the concern with the privatization of the public
sphere that motivated the affichistes in 1950s Paris and similar concerns being urgently
debated in late 1970s West Germany. I will return below to the West German debates
surrounding state surveillance. The affichiste incision and removal of vandalized sections
of urban walls is a helpful image for thinking through the revisions Vostell and Heyme
made to Shakespeare’s script and to the theater experience generally. One Hamlet critic

466
See Slavo Kacunko, Colsed Circuit Videoinstallationen: ein Leitfaden zur Geschichte
und Theorie der Medienkunst mit Bausteinen eines Künstlerlexikons (Berlin: Logos,
2004), 314.
467
Johannes Birringer, Media and Performance along the Border (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 164.
220
described Vostell as “the top propagandist for Happenings, Fluxus and dé-collage in
Germany,” and another wrote, “The décollage, which Heyme and Vostell’s Hamlet
continues to celebrate electronically, emerged as an artistic principle in the 1950s.”
468

Without offering readers any context around the term or its Parisian origins,
commentators on Hamlet made décollage into a phenomenon that was not only German
but also theatrical.

Body and Apparatus in Vostell’s Electronic Hamlet

Every detail of the set pieces, props, and costumes of Heyme and Vostell’s
Hamlet contributed to the spectral aspect of the electronic media on stage. The ghost of
the late King Hamlet, played by the actress Josefine Schult-Prasser, flittered out of a trap
door in the stage and delivered her first monologue wreathed in a crown of thirty
television antennae radiating out from behind her head (fig. 9).
469
When asked what kind
of set he planned to make, Vostell responded, “The investigation of this psychodrama is
unthinkable for me without the use of video technology. I will make an anti-television

468
“Deutschlands agilster Propagandist von Happenings, Fluxus und Décollage.” This is
somewhat misleading because he seems to have been the only artist in Germany
employing the term décollage. See Ulrich Schreiber, “Kölner Mediensalat: ‘Hamlet’ -
von Wolf Vostell und Hansgünther Heyme,” Frankfurter Rundschau (23 Feb 1979); and
“Die Décollage, der Heyme/Vostells Hamlet elektronisch nachfeiert, ist als Prinzip
aufgekommen in der Kunst der 50er Jahre.” Heinrich Wormweg, “Hamlet, elektronisch
verkleinert: Heyme/Vostell Shakespeare-Inszenierung am Kölner Schauspielhaus,”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich (20 Feb 1979) in TWS.
469
Heyme’s casting of a female to play the ghost of King Hamlet need not be understood
as gender bending. Working with an all-male cast, Shakespeare himself doubled minor
roles with little attention to gender. No critic of the Cologne production remarked that the
gender of the actor distracted from her role as the King’s ghost.
221
theater piece.”
470
Vostell’s apprehension in front of television’s potentially alienating
effects is clear from the fact that Hamlet’s insanity is conveyed in the moments when the
protagonist looks straight into the camera. This video recorder was perched on a tripod,
roughly human height, which rolled around the stage on wheels, and fed directly into the
row of monitors on the stage floor. Each monitor affected a slightly different distortion to
the image.
Critics understood the staging as an attack on the “media-dependency of people…
the vicarious life” and its “manipulation and denaturing of humankind.”
471
Hamlet
confided in the television camera as much as in Horatio and other characters did not talk
to each other so much as to technology and past each other. One critic wrote, “There is no
real dialogue in this production, no traditional exchanges, whether in hatred, intrigue,
love, or friendship. Again and again the technical equipment of the recorder and the
camera inserts itself in between everything.”
472

Upon learning of the death of her father, Ophelia sinks into a deep depression and
shortly before drowning, distributes flowers to her brother and the royal family: “There’s

470
“Die Durchleuchtung dieses Psychodramas ist für mich undenkbar ohne den Einsatz
von Videotechnik. Ich werde im Theater Anti-Fernsehen machen.” See Werner Krüger,
“Sein ‘Hamlet’ endet mit der Tagesschau: Heymes letzte Kölner Premiere wird als
Videospektakel ausgestattet / Happening-Künstler Wolf Vostell: Ich bringe bildnerisches
Denken ins Theater,” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (31 Dec 1978) in TWS.
471
“…die Medienhörigkeit der Menschen… das Second-hand-Leben.” Sonja Luyken,
“Plädoyer gegen den Bildschirmterror” (1979) and “Sie vollstrecken die Manipulation,
sie denaturieren den Menschen,” in Günther Scholz, “Hamlets Kampf gegen die Medien:
Hansgünther Heyme und Wolf Vostell versetzen Shakespeare ins elektronische
Zeitalter,” Deutsche Zeitung Christ und Welt (23 Feb 1979) in ibid.
472
“Kein wirklicher Dialog, kein traditionelles Zueinander, sei es in Haß, Intrige, Liebe
oder Freundschaft kennzeichnet dieses Spiel. Immer wieder schiebt sich die technische
Apparatur der Recorder und der Kamera zwischen alles.” See W. Stauch von Quitzow,
“Der Kölner Medien-Hamlet: Oder: wie Hansgünther Heyme an Shakespeare versucht,”
Allgemeine Zeitung, Mainz (23 Feb 1979) in ibid.
222
rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s
for thoughts… There’s fennel for you, and columbines… There’s a daisy. I would give
you a violet but they withered all when my father died.” (4.5.170-79)
473
In the
Vostell/Heyme interpretation, Ophelia distributed technological gifts such as mini
transistor radios rather than flowers. As each flower in Shakespeare’s text signifies a
concept such as memory or thoughtfulness, so the electronic devices signified
forgetfulness and thoughtlessness, while portending the electric shock that decimated the
royal house. Like the Ghost, Ophelia embodied the link between technology and the spirit
world. Her presumed suicide following her father’s death is a major turning point for
Hamlet, who begins to grieve intensely when the gravediggers unearth the skull of
Yorick, a jester from Hamlet’s childhood. Rather than shovels, Vostell’s gravediggers
wielded television parts and a jackhammer. In mourning, Hamlet drew the chalk-line of
an electrocardiogram calming to a straight horizontal along the iron curtain then
collapsed in sorrow over Ophelia’s grave (see fig. 2). Cameras, jackhammers, and
electrocardiograms were the media through which Hamlet connected with his past,
Yorick, the Ghost, and Ophelia. They alienated him from his earthly existence but
connected him to the realm of spirits.
Hamlet’s psychological breakdown and the deconstruction of his individuality
were visualized even more forcefully by the doubling of the role. Heyme cast Wolfgang
Robert in the role of Prince Hamlet, but due to Robert’s wavering health and the
possibility that he would not be able to perform, Heyme accompanied him in the title

473
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York and London: W. W.
Norton and Company, 2011), 98-99.
223
role, either on stage as a body double or with a disembodied voice-over (fig. 10).
474
The
only scenes in which Wolfgang Robert played the part of Hamlet alone were those in
which he was with the ghost of his father. Over Robert’s voice, Heyme recited the
soliloquies “to be or not to be” as well as “oh that this too solid flesh would melt” from
his seat five rows into the audience section, with his voice projected over loudspeakers.
The bodies on stage and off were thus being electronically doubled both visually and
aurally. The two voices of Hamlet were never in perfect unison, each speaking, at times
shrieking, according to a slightly different rhythm, as if to demonstrate the splitting of
person, inchoate schizophrenia, and alter ego of the prince. The closed circuit video
technology point to the singularity of the live actor, while the disembodied voiceover
made Heyme’s contribution anonymous and depersonalized.
Heyme’s deep, amplified breath indicated the existence of a disembodied other,
but also the eerie feeling of being watched, and for the audience, of being a voyeur. Most
of the audience members could see Heyme in the fifth row, and they could certainly see
Hamlet on stage, but Hamlet could not see Heyme, or at least pretended not to. For the
scenes in which Hamlet was alone with the Ghost, even the Ghost was more present than
Hamlet, who was split among bodies on stage and off. As Hamlet’s sanity slipped away
ever more quickly, Heyme appeared on stage as Robert’s shadow, embracing Robert
from behind. The circumstances, including the lead actor falling ill and his replacement

474
Wolfgang Robert became ill and Vadim Glowna, the television star and lead in the
previous chapter’s discussion of The Robbers, replaced him in the title role. After two
weeks Glowna left the production in disagreement with Vostell’s media concept. In that
time, Robert recovered and returned to play Hamlet. See Renate Müller, “Vadim Glowna
legte die Hamlet-Rolle nieder,” Kölnische Rundschau (19 Jan 1979); “Glowna spielt
nicht mit: Kölner 'Hamlet' ohne ihn,” Elfelner Nachrichten (22 Jan 1979); and “Glowna
will keinen Video-Hamlet spielen,” Pinneberger Tageblatt (2 Feb 1979) in TWS.
224
quitting, thus led to even more innovative technological and phenomenological
interventions, such as the doubling of Hamlet’s voice through a loudspeaker. This tension
between mechanically reproduced sounds and images on stage in Cologne had been the
centerpiece of epic theater in the 1920s.
Piscator’s Proletarian Theater used the mechanically reproduced sound and image
to develop a dramatic tension with the live actors, to “attain a furioso” of action and
“effective propaganda.” Vostell and Heyme could not find hope in such language or
blatant politicization of the medium by the late 1970s. Instead, they found a more
disquieting use for electronics on stage. The video camera recorded fragments of actors’
bodies and sent them to the monitors in an enlarged but blurred form (see fig. 4 and 9).
These close-ups ironically reified the distance already in place between viewer and
televised object. Martin Heidegger described this phenomenon in 1953: “The peak of this
abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television… Yet the frantic
abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of
distance. What is least remote from us in point of distance, by virtue of its picture on film
or its sound on the radio, can remain far from us.”
475
While the televised details of
Hamlet’s face appeared closer to the audience by virtue of their magnification, the live
actor complicated the apparent closeness of those images, standing before the audience as
if to prove that knowledge and images transmitted over television are partial at best.
Vostell made literal the television’s German name, Fernseher [television], literally
“long/distance seer.”

475
This excerpt is from a speech Heidegger delivered in 1953 at the Bayerischen
Akademie der Schönen Künste, printed in German by the academy in 1954 and translated
by Albert Hofstadter as “The Thing,” in the collection, Martin Heidegger, Poetry,
Language, Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 163.
225
Much of the scholarly discourse of multimedia performance centers on the notion
that the simultaneous electronic reproduction of a live event on stage dissolves the live
performer’s body into the electronic image.
476
The philosopher Avital Ronell has also
examined technology’s distortion and the incomplete rendering of Hamlet’s character,
writing that one of the central problems Hamlet faces, “to be or not to be” is epitomized
by the experience of technology. According to Ronell, “Hamlet was swallowed by
telephonics …The telephone’s most sacredly repeated declamation before an audience
was to be… ‘To be or not to be,’ marking the interstice between ghostly conjuration and
the voice of the other.”
477
One never wants the response to “Hello? Are you there?” to be
silence or heavy breathing, yet in Cologne that eerie phenomenon occurred, in which the
technologically-produced other was present in audible gasps but never fully disclosed.
Ronell emphasized that within the anxiety of telephonic communication, “one grows
tense with anticipation to learn the charges; like Hamlet, one beckons it to speak more

476
This debate was sparked by Peggy Phelan’s view that performance is necessarily live
and a singular occurrence; all other ephemera and documentation, she argued, are not,
strictly speaking, performance. See Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993). Philip Auslander responded with his often-cited, Liveness.
Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). Further
contributions to this debate include Bonnie Marranca, The Theatre of Images (Baltmore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Birringer, Media and Performance along the
Border (1998); Günter Berghaus, Avant-Garde Performance (2005); Susan Broadhurst
and Josephine Machon, ed., Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual
Embodiment and Interactivity (Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006); Matthew Causey, Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation
to Embeddedness (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Steve Dixon and Barry
Smith, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance
Art, and Installation (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2007); Salter, Entangled
(2010); Peter Boenisch, Rosemary Klich, and Edward Scheer, Multimedia Performance
(Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Almost all of these texts
mention Vostell but only Berghaus and Boenisch mention the 1979 Hamlet production.
477
Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 283.
226
distinctly.”
478
Like a phone call, Hamlet waits for the ghost to manifest but cannot
summon it at will.
Vostell emphasized the delusion of nearness in electronic images and sounds by
pitting the human against its technological reproduction.

Vostell explained, “…the actors
will use the video camera as part of their body language… This corporeal-electronic body
language will constantly appear on [the] monitors.”
479
Vostell’s use of technological
media was directed toward an audience that was more accustomed to hearing the bland
voices of news reporters than Shakespeare’s eloquent rhythms. Vostell foresaw the way
in which new media would alter the history of art and the technological communication
would compete with human interaction. To use technology as Hamlet did with the video
recorder, as both operator and receiver, was to enact a psychological breakdown specific
to an electronic age by acknowledging the ulterior being on the opposite end of the
device as one’s own self.
480
The contemporary expression, “we are breaking up,” which
refers to interference on a crowded telephone grid as well as the dissolution of a romantic
relationship, was the final message of the production. The break-up, or perhaps
breakdown, was more than a literal failure of electronics; Hamlet himself abandoned
inter-human communication and took refuge in his spirit-world of electronics.

The Barbarism of Technology

478
Ibid., 303.
479
“…als Teil einer erweiterten Körpersprache bedienen die Schauspieler die Video-
Kamera… Diese Körpersprache wird auf… Monitoren ständig zu sehen sein.” See Wolf
Vostell, “Der Elektronische Hamlet” in Shakespeare Hamlet Heyme/Vostell (Cologne:
Wienand Verlag, 1979), 18.
480
Ronell theorizes technology’s priduction of an “other” in The Telephone Book (1989).
227
Heyme was studying in the mid-1950s when he came under Piscator’s tutelage in
Mannheim.
481
Heyme began as Piscator’s assistant and the two collaborated closely for a
decade until Heyme received his first invitation to the Berlin Theatertreffen in 1965 and
came into his own. In West Germany, Piscator was no longer staging productions in beer
halls in working class neighborhoods, as he had with Heartfield.
482
Nevertheless, Piscator
transported an important tradition of Weimer-era socialist theater into this new context,
albeit with fewer financial concerns. Given the atmosphere of skepticism toward
surveillance in West Germany and Heyme’s reservations about television, Hamlet was far
from affirmative on the role of technology. Rather, it made use of electronic devices in an
“epic” sense by exposing the equipment that produces media images as highly subjective
and implicating audience members in the scenery through classic defamiliarization
effects.
In grappling with the political implications of putting Shakespeare’s characters on
stage with surveillance cameras and live news broadcasts, we return to Piscator and
Heartfield’s montage strategy. Piscator exclaimed that in the 1925 production of In Spite
of Everything!, “The whole performance was a montage of authentic speeches, essays,
newspaper cuttings, appeals, pamphlets, photographs, and film of the war and the
Revolution, of historical persons and scenes.”
483
Vostell’s abrupt shift from
Shakespeare’s narrative to that of breaking nightly news might even be understood in the
terms Piscator used to recount his 1925 production: “The momentary surprise when we

481
William Grange, Historical Dictionary of German Theater (Lanham, MD, Toronto,
and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2006), 162.
482
Volker Canaris, “Erstarrte Schritte eines Aufrechten Ganges,” Der Spiegel Nr. 9 (26
Feb 1979) in TWS.
483
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre [1929] (New York: Avon Books, 1978), 94.
228
changed from live scenes to film was very effective. But the dramatic tension that live
scene and film clip derived from one another was even stronger. They interacted and built
up each other’s power, and at intervals the action attained a furioso that I have seldom
experienced in theater… What emerged was that the most effective political propaganda
lay along the same lines as the highest artistic form.”
484
Heartfield and Piscator’s epic
theater strategy of imbuing propagandistic forms with radical and subversive messages
was the centerpiece of the Cologne stage as it had been in the 1920s.
Propaganda was no longer the operative term for political theater in the postwar
period. On a rhetorical level, “agitational propaganda” was replaced by participatory and
immersive conceptions of theater that were no less important for epic theater.
Participation might seem an exaggerated claim to make for the Cologne audience
members since they never left their seats. There are nevertheless key ways in which the
Cologne audience echoed Piscator’s description of In Spite of Everything! The 1925
multimedia surround featured a rotating stage and multiple simultaneous projections of
film that supposedly resulted in yelling, fist waving, and other visceral reactions. In
contrast to the Happening, Vostell’s collaboration with Heyme showed that participating
in culture was not just social community building among a small elite and it was not only
the ability to follow directions and jump through a field of car tires. The Brechtian notion
of participation on which Heyme and Vostell drew is one that challenges the audience to
make decisions and engage in the ethical problems that the stage action presents. This
was Brecht’s concept of theater as a sporting event, where the spectators are personally
invested in the outcome, but in a rational and dispassionate rather than purely emotional

484
Ibid., 97.
229
way. When Heyme spoke Hamlet’s lines from the fifth row, those sitting nearby became
supernumeraries and witnesses to the action. When the roving video camera scanned the
audience, it transported unsuspecting faces onto television monitors on stage. In addition
to Shakespeare’s confronting the audience with the moral ambiguity of Hamlet’s
decisions, Vostell visually documented the audience’s “contamination” of the play.
485

The program booklet stated that Heyme was responsible for direction and Vostell
for the “media concept, set design, and costume Verfremdung” (defamiliarization). In
1979, under normal circumstances, a television, radio, flash bulb, or any other electronic
item on stage would have been familiar to most audience members, as would the basic
plot of Shakespeare’s play for a subscription audience, and the Victorian dress the actors
wore. Vostell made all of these elements unfamiliar, however, by the particular way in
which he combined them. One critic used the term “verfremd” (distanced/othered) to
describe the effect of the camera zooming in on details like a mouth, nose, or prop piece
and projecting them on television monitors.
486
This was not only Brechtian Verfremdung,
but also the distancing from self that technology incites, the way one sees oneself
differently on screen and hears one’s voice differently in recordings than in person.
Hamlet’s distanced gaze into the video camera and then toward the audience recalled
Brecht’s signal essay on the V-effect, in which he wrote, “Above all, the Chinese artist
never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. He expresses

485
Harold Bloom described how in Hamlet, “we the audience contaminate the play. That
contamination is unique in Shakespeare, and is one of the elements that render Hamlet a
class of one among Shakespeare’s high tragedies. No other drama ever is so overtly
audience-aware, or makes us so complicit in its procedures.” See Hamlet: Poem
Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), 16.
486
Heinz Klunker, “Kunst 2000: Heymes Hamlet in Vostells TV-Landschaft,” Deutsches
Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, Hamburg (25 Feb 1979) in TWS.
230
that he knows he is being watched… The artist’s object is to appear strange and even
surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his
performance.”
487

The productions of Piscator and Brecht specifically used new electronic
technologies and lighting apparatuses to implicate their spectators. Helping audiences to
realize their role as agents in a particular moment in history was one of the great political
aspirations of electronics in the epic theater. The central techniques were Moholy-Nagy’s
overlapping film projections, Heartfield and Piscator’s back-projected historical footage
next to live actors, and Brecht’s bright house lighting. While these epic theater
practitioners were the most rigorous theorists of this strategy, they were not alone in
using stage electronic lighting during the interwar period to startle their audiences. In
Paris in 1924 Francis Picabia designed a stage set for Erik Satie’s ballet, Relâche, which
featured concentric arches supporting 370 metal discs, each with a light bulb inside (fig.
11).
488
Rosalind Krauss declared the moment when Picabia’s lights turned on “an act of
terrorism.”
489
Considering Picabia’s 1924 stage set as a work of sculpture, she wrote, “it
has used theater and its relation to the context of the viewer as a tool to destroy, to
investigate, and to reconstruct.”
490
Abrasive lighting as an avant-garde strategy, then, was
to jolt spectators into action, cognitively and physically.

487
Bertolt Brecht, “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting” [1936] in Brecht on Theater,
3
rd
Edition, Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, eds. (New York and London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 151-52.
488
A helpful description of this production is found in Pontus Hultén, The Machine as
Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 96.
The Ballet de Lorraine’s 2014 recreation also offers a historically sensitive interpretation.
489
Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture [1977] (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1983), 204.
490
Ibid., 242.
231
Vostell used this tactic when the characters in Hamlet died, one by one, through
electric shocks that Vostell used bright spotlights to represent (fig. 12). This not only
looks, and must have felt, similar to being in Brecht, Picabia, or indeed Minks and
Zadek’s bright light, but also shared the same intention of implicating the audience in the
ethically ambiguous scenes that make up Shakespeare’s play. In a pre-production
interview, Vostell said, “We are Hamlet,” suggesting that the audience attempt to
empathize with the difficult decision Hamlet faced when the ghost of his father called on
him to commit murder.
491
This was also part of Vostell’s visual vocabulary, recalling his
1958 sculpture Auschwitz Floodlight 568, which scandalized unsuspecting gallery visitors
(see fig. 6a). On stage in Hamlet this same device, coordinated with Heyme,
demonstrates how Vostell’s practice overlapped with a central tenet of epic theater. One
critic remarked, “as a glaring spotlight hits us right in the eyes, we wonder if we,
ourselves, are Hamlet.”
492

West German media discourse in the late 1970s scrutinized the role of technology
in daily life and audiences were primed for Vostell’s extreme distrust of television. On
the one hand, overt links between television and government had been weakening since
the end of WWII and programming, which is now dictated largely by commercial
pressures, still featured more artistically and politically subversive content. On the other
hand, European theorists blamed the violence in West Germany in the late 1970s on the

491
Quoted in Hans Joachim Schyle, “Vorstoß ins Ungewisse,” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (19
Jan 1979) in TWS. Vostell was hardly the first to make this claim. William Hazlitt, for
example, wrote as early as 1814, “it is we who are Hamlet.” See David Howe, ed.,
Selections from William Hazlitt (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1913), 1.
492
Herbert Leisegang, “Elektronischer Hamlet: Hansgünther Heymes inszenatorisches
Schlußexperiment in Köln,” Neue OZ Osnabrücker Zeitung (21 Feb 1979) in TWS.
232
confusion and anxiety caused by television.
493
The critique held television’s fragmented
and biased presentation of information partially responsible for the bloodshed of the
“German autumn” of 1977, including assassinations, an airplane hijacking, and the
mysterious death of the RAF leaders.
494
The culture of terror led to another factor
widespread on Vostell’s stage, the incursion of surveillance technologies into daily life.
In the years immediately following the Cologne production, fears about state
surveillance becoming more like Stasi-controlled East German and the abuse of
technology had materialized.
495
The television monitors on stage were visual evidence
that the video camera on stage was in fact collecting footage of the audience without
permission. In 1988, Guy Debord looked back with increasing confidence that what he
had described as spectacle had materialized in the mass media and surveillance programs
around the world: “Many believe they are in on the secret… Someone who is happy to be
given confidential information is hardly likely to criticise it; nor to notice that in all that is

493
This accusation was based mainly on the militant terrorist activities of the RAF. See
Dot Tuer, Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art, Technology, and Cultural
Resistance (Toronto, ON: YYZ Books, 2005), 48; and Dorothea Hauser, “Terrorism,” in
1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977, ed. Martin Klimke and
Joachim Scharloth (Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmilan, 2008), 276.
494
The term Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn) comes from the 1978 film
Deutschland im Herbst, a montage about this turbulent moment in postwar West German
history with contributions from filmmakers including Fassbinder. See Michaela Kromer,
“Rainer Werner Fassbinder" in "Deutschland im Herbst”: Fassbinders radikale
filmische Selbstentblößung: Ein Film über die persönliche Betroffenheit in einem Film
aus persönlicher Betroffenheit (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2011) and Karrin Henshaw,
Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), 192-235, and 241-2.
495
See Ronald J. Deibert, “Black Code Redux: Censorship, Surveillance, and the
Militarization of Cyberspace,” in Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times,
ed. Megan Boler (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2008), 150; James
Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security Agency (New
York: Anchor Books, 2002); and Matthew M. Aid and Cees Weibes, Secrets of Signals
Intelligence During the Cold War and Beyond (London: Frank Cass, 2001).
233
confided to him, the principal part of reality is invariably hidden…”
496
While the Hamlet
audience was granted access to surveillance footage of the actors and of themselves, they
were not told whether the video material would be kept or shared. Vostell thus simulated
current anxieties about one’s appearance before anonymous onlookers, security agents,
and spies.
Brecht acknowledged the way the theater house’s backstage area also only
partially discloses information to the audience. Instead of trying to reveal the entire
backstage apparatus and dramaturgical decision-making process, he aimed to remind his
audiences that those hidden aspects exist within the theater, and that access to the means
of production is only ever partial. Vostell’s stage setup, which allowed the audience to
see the live actor, the video camera, and the resulting “surveillance” image, positioned
the audience as voyeurs if not intelligence agents. In this way audience members were
visually implicated in the stage action without even moving from their seats. One critic
described the video setup on stage with terms like “spionieren” (to spy) and
“überwachen” (to surveil).”
497
Others referred to the roving on-stage camera as “Big
Brother,” the leader of the fictional totalitarian surveillance state in George Orwell’s
1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
498
Less than a week after the publication of the
aforementioned theater reviews, the major West German newspaper, Die Zeit, printed the
article, “Informants, Secret Police, and Spies: Feared and Successful, the East German

496
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle [1988], Malcolm Imrie, Trans.
(London and New York: Verso, 1998/2007), 61.
497
Jochen Schmidt, “Hamlet und der Terror der Medien” (1979) and Hans Joachim
Schyle, “Ein voll elektronischer Shakespeare von Heyme und Vostell” (1979) in TWS.
498
See Günther Scholz, “Hamlets Kampf gegen die Medien” (1979). The array of
televisions on desks in the finale bore an uncanny resemblance to the enormous chamber
of desks with typewriters in Orson Welles’ 1962 film The Trial, based on Kafka’s novel,
which also takes up themes of law, power, and surveillance.
234
Ministry for State Security,” reporting that the East German spying program had
informants in West Germany who “seem to be everywhere.”
499
Within Vostell and
Heyme’s reading of Shakespeare, Cold War anxieties about power and the distrust of
family and neighbors were revealed to be as old as Hamlet, who in fact senses he is being
spied upon and as a knee-jerk reaction stabs his dagger into a curtain, killing Polonius
without even knowing for sure who is victim is.
Gallery displays of film and video art in the decade leading up to Hamlet
naturalized the politics of this surveillance scenario. Some artists whose eerie film and
video installations were defanged in this manner by white-cube setting are Les Levine,
Bruce Nauman, Jonas, Vito Acconci, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Dara Birnbaum,
and Klaus vom Bruch. Close-circuit video cameras were used to set up scenarios of
surveillance include Levine’s Slipcover (1966), Nauman’s Video Surveillance Piece:
Public Room, Private Room (1969-1970), and Acconci’s Command Performance (1974),
each of which recorded the viewer’s body and project it on at least one monitor in a
closed-circuit (fig. 13). In Command Performance, the viewer sat on a stool illuminated
by a bright spotlight in the center of a gallery, facing a television monitor on the floor that
showed a recording of the artist instructing the viewer to step into the spotlight and
perform, while a video camera picked up that person’s response and sent it to another
monitor behind him, which other viewers in the gallery could watch. Claire Bishop
writes, “by the mid-to-late 1970s, Acconci turned to making installations in which the

499
“Die Damen und Herren vom Ostberliner Ministerium für Staatssicherheit…scheinen
überall zu sein.” See Michael Naumann, “Spitzel, Stasi und Spione: Gefürchtet und
erfolgreich: Das DDR-Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,” Die Zeit (23 Feb 1979). Garrett
Stewart discusses the resonanc between closed-circuit television, cinematic viewing and
Orwell in Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2015), 60-79.
235
audience was invited to ‘act’ and assume for themselves the role of performer… In the
late 1960s and early 1970s, instant video feedback was widely used by artists, since it
allowed them to watch the monitor (as if it were a mirror) while simultaneously
performing for the camera.”
500

Like Vostell’s stage, these projects offered versions of the German critic Max
Imdahl’s notion of “seeing seeing” (das sehende Sehen), in which the spectator’s activity
of seeing is made into a subject for his own visual analysis.
501
Friedrich Wolfram
Heubach used a similar formulation to discuss Dan Graham in the 1960s: “Video
technology provides a direct image playback on the monitor enabling the person
portrayed to experience himself simultaneously as both subject and object. He looks and
sees himself looking; he perceives himself and is perceived in the same moment, in one
and the same act of perception.”
502
Compared to the Hamlet critics, the terms of Imdahl
and Heubach’s analyses appear depoliticized. The same apparatuses that recalled fascist
communication techniques and Stasi espionage programs on the theater stage appeared to
these shrewd art critics as the anodyne phenomenological act of facing oneself.
Shakespeare’s text was of course already about spying and intrigue, and so any video
equipment Vostell placed on stage would seem to also thematize these subjects, but it
also seems that some of these video artists resisted the narrative elements that Vostell was
forced to confront when faced with a script, and that this narrative aspect sharpened the
critiques his electronic media were able to make.
Although Vostell and Heyme had different backgrounds, they both came to the

500
Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005),
69.
501
Max Imdahl, Bildautonomie und Wirklichkeit (1981).
502
Emphasis original. Heubach, “The Observed Eye” [1960s] (1998), 191.
236
theater with strongly held views on electronic technologies. Heyme explained Hamlet as
“a picture of the inability of today’s forty and fifty-year-olds to process the terrible legacy
of their fathers and to realize some sort of advanced theory against the brutality of
contemporary media practices.”
503
Heyme, forty-three years old at the time, was within
the population he described as struggling to come to terms with the Nazi past. The
production’s media-saturation highlighted what he considered to be his generation’s need
for distractions from dealing with the wreckage of World War II, and its failure to see
how forms of barbarism continued into postwar society. He lamented that, “From the
wreckage of the second catastrophe Germans caused in this century, we have not
managed to build a world more important than all these media.”
504
One critic claimed that
for Heyme, “the new fascism, the television, has torn and desecrated the soul of the
people.”
505

Yet, he commissioned a television artist to develop the stage concept. Television
and video art had been areas of resistance to these totalizing forces of mass media
throughout the 1970s. Portable electronic devices were still relatively new; Sony
introduced the Portapak, a handheld video camera, in 1967.
506
Artists such as Lamelas,

503
“Hamlet… ist ein Bild für die Unfähigkeit der heute Vierzig- bis Fünfzigjährigen, das
wüste Erbe der Väter zu verarbeiten und eine Fortschrittliche Theorie gegenüber
medienbrutaler Praxis zu verwirklichen.” Hansgünther Heyme and Peter Kleinschmidt,
“Hamlet—das ist Deutschland” in Shakespeare Hamlet Heyme/Vostell (1979), 15.
504
“Daß wir es nicht geschafft haben, aus dem Trümmern der zweiten Katastrophe, die
wir Deutschen in diesem Jahrhundert angerichtet haben, all die Dinge die unseren
Fortschritt ausmachen könnten - also die Medien etwa - vernünftig einzurichten” Hans
Joachim Schyle, “Hamlet als Gegenpart für Medienflut: Gespräch mit Hansgünther
Heyme,” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Nr. 40/13 (16 Feb 1979) in TWS.
505
“‘Der neue Faschismus’, das Fernsehen, diese Volksseele ‘zerfetzt und geschändet’
habe.” Sonja Luyken, “Plädoyer gegen den Bildschirmterror” (1979) in ibid.
506
For a discussion of the Portapak, see Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art:
The Development of Form and Function (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 10.
237
LaMonte Young, Shigeko Kubota, and Paik were experimenting with them more in
gallery contexts than scenic designers in West German theaters. Until 1968, artists had
little access to the actual programming and content of television broadcasts, and so prior
to that treated the television set as a sculptural object more than as a subversive means of
communication.
507
Vostell and Paik’s early experiments with television art were
emblematic of this sculptural approach.
Vostell’s engagement with new sound and imaging technologies should be read
against the backdrop of McLuhan’s contemporary notion of embodied media.
508
Media
scholar Holly Rogers even claims that Paik and Vostell’s experiments can be understood
as “pre-empting the publication in 1964 of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man.”
509
This text was released in Germany in 1968 with the
paranormal title, Die magischen Kanäle (Channels of Magic).
510
McLuhan began his
iconic book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), with a six-page discussion of multi-sensory
perception in King Lear, seizing upon Shakespeare’s “almost scholastic demonstration of
the need for a ratio and interplay among the senses as the very constitution of

507
Holly Rogers, Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 15.
508
Olivier Debroise has speculated that Vostell’s collaboration with Minjun and Allan
Kaprow on the transatlantic work Simultaneity in Simultaneity was “designed to activate
a statement from McLuhan’s ‘Agentbite of Outwit’ (1963): ‘Post-literate… electronic
media contract the world to a tribe or village where everything happens to everyone at the
same time: everyone knows about, and therefore participates in, everything that is
happening the moment it happens.’” See Debroise, “Looking at the Sky in Buenos
Aires,” Getty Research Journal 1 (2009), 130.
509
Rogers, Sounding the Gallery (2013), 15
510
Marshall McLuhan, Die magischen Kanäle (Düsseldorf: Econ-Verlag, 1968). On the
Germany reception of McLuhan, see Stefan Münker, Philosophie nach den ‘Medial
Turn’: Beiträge zur Theorie der Mediengesellschaft (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009);
and Peter Donaldson, “‘All which it inherit’: Shakespeare, Globes and Global Media,”
Shakespeare Surveys 52 (1999): 191.
238
rationality.”
511
Citing Gloucester’s eyeballs being gouged out as a loss of overall
perception and stability, McLuhan argued that Shakespeare was ahead of his time in
understanding that power lay in the integration, not the separation, of the senses. Despite
Vostell’s lifelong interest in immersive environments, he and Brecht both considered
multi-sensory integration, from Wagnerian opera to television, a kind of brainwashing.
512

There has been much theoretical work done in the decades since McLuhan’s
foundational theses speculating that viewers have come to feel more comfortable with
mediatized environments and electronic images than live presence, especially when both
options are offered on theater stages.
513
One aspect that might have made it possible to
resist the trance of the televisions on Vostell’s stage, however, was the artist’s insistence
on presenting electronic images that were decentered, blurred, shaky, and otherwise
unframed by the apparatus. Writing about Vostell’s incorporation of video into a 1964
performance, Steve Dixon writes, “Video commonly became employed to portray
television and mass media as a tool of consciousness numbing, social coercion and

511
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 13. See also McLuhan and Bruce R.
Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the Twenty-
First Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Richard
Courtney, Shakespeare’s World of Death: The Early Tragedies (Toronto: Simon and
Pierre, 1995), 160.
512
Vostell and Brecht developed intensely multi-sensory experiences, but considered the
blurring of the senses into totalizing and disorienting scenarios to be deceptive and
ideological. Simhandl addresses this distinction briefly in Bildertheater (1993), 42.
513
Hans-Thies Lehmann asks, “What constitutes the magic attraction that seduces the
gaze to follow the image when given the choice between devouring something real or
something imaginary?” in Postdramatic Theatre [1999], trans. Karen Jürs-Munby
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 170. See also Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene
of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence,’” in Film and Theory: An
Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell,
2000), 67-84.
239
disintegration, and political propaganda or oppression.
514
Chris Salter similarly discusses
Paik and Vostell’s engagements with television as comments “on the military-industrial
context of media images.”
515

Other contemporaries of Vostell have confronted not just the apparatus but also
the mechanisms by which their content and funding is determined. Birringer argued that
video art’s “other” and unavoidable root was “the television screen and its omnipresence
as an icon of mass culture.”
516
The affront to the autonomous work of art that the avant-
garde artist sets in motion was already implicit in the mass-cultural origins and
ephemerality of video art. In the 1970s federal funding for television supported critical
endeavors and programming was not yet entirely dictated by commercial pressures.
517
Gerry Schum and his wife Ursula Wevers’ Fernsehgalerie (Television Gallery) was a
virtual venue for art, broadcast over West German television stations between 1968 and
1970.
518
The intent of the Television Gallery was to avoid the gallery’s mechanisms of
exclusion and the art market’s commodity exchange.
519
In hopes of using the television to
create a new experience of contemporary art, Schum refused to add voice-overs and
soundtracks, which Lutz Koepnick explains caused broadcast officials to pull out of the

514
Steve Dixon and Barry Smith, Digital Performance (2007), 90.
515
Chris Salter, Entangled (2010), 123.
516
Johannes Birringer, Media and Performance along the Border (1998), 152.
517
Monika Treut writes, “In the 1960s and 1970s, German television, led by the two main
public networks (ARD and ZDF) had been more or less supportive of the New German
Cinema, and many of the creative films of that period had been coproduced with either
the ZDF or ARD.” Privately funded channels in the 1980s opted for more conservative
soap operas and talk shows rather than documentaries and experimental projects. See
“German Cinema in the 1990s,” in A New Germany in a New Europe, ed. Todd Herzog
and Sander L. Gilman (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 122.
518
Robyn Farrell, “Network(ed) TV: Collaboration and Intervention at Fernsehgalerie
Gerry Schum and Videogalerie Schum,” Afterimage 43.3 (Nov/Dec 2015): 12-19.
519
Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 176.
240
project because its circumvention of both television watching and the art market
ironically was at odds with the mission of West German television “to limit any kind of
political, cultural, or economic bias so as to prevent any abuses of modern mass media
similar to the ones carried out during the Nazi period.”
520
Robyn Farrell refers to the
Television Gallery’s disruptions in regularly scheduled media content as “Brechtian,”
which is apt in so far as they defamiliarized the experience of both television watching
and viewing avant-garde art.
521
Having contemporary art inserted into one’s at-home
entertainment experience as a “special bulletin” brings us back to the “disruption” of the
live news broadcast in the Hamlet production, which made “regularly scheduled” news
into “breaking news,” as if all news suddenly becomes “urgent.”
Land Art was a thirty-five minute broadcast in April 1969 that included the re-
mediation and dissemination of site-based works by Walter de Maria, Richard Long,
Robert Smithson, and others. Jan Dibbets’ TV as Fireplace, a shot of a crackling fireplace
that interrupted regular programming for nearly three minutes each night from December
24 to December 31, 1969.
522
Schum’s Identifications followed in 1970 with work by
twenty contemporary artists, including Beuys, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert and George,
Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, and Richard Serra.
523
One of the projects included in
Identifications was the interruption of regular programming for eight consecutive nights

520
Lutz Koepnick, “Pause>Rewind>Play: Video Art in Cold War Germany,” Barron and
Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys (2009), 208; and Eric de Bruyn, “Land Art in der
Medienlandschaft: Anmerkungen zur Politik der Gegenöffentlichkeit im Jahr 1969,” in
Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum/Videogalerie Schum, ed. Ulrike Groos,
Barbara Hess, Ursula Wevers, and Beatrice von Bismarck (Cologne: Snoeck, 2003), 144-
57.
521
Ibid., 16.
522
Farrell, “Network(ed) TV” (2015): 16.
523
Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 2
nd
Ed. (New York and London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 23.
241
to briefly show a series of photographs by the artist Keith Arnatt. The Canadian artist
Robin Page also demand his home viewers make drawings of him and submit them to the
television studio.
524
One of the most famous works in Identifications was a montage
Schum made out of Beuys’ re-enactment of a 1966 performance, Filz TV (Felt TV; filmed
in 1969 and broadcast in 1970). Beuys sat in front of a felt-wrapped television screen and
punched his own head with boxing gloves while “watching” the news report, pressing a
sausage into the felt screen, and then into the wall, as if trying to transfer energy or
information between these media. If Beuys was trying to distill meaning from the
television-watching experience, as he claimed, through filtering out the unthinking,
routine aspects of that activity, then Schum doubled that mediation by selectively cutting
between moments in the performance, some during which Beuys was not even in the
frame at all.
525

Vostell’s Hamlet may seem less pungent as a critique of electronic media when
considered alongside the Fernsehgalerie’s intervention, nine years earlier, into the
structure of the art market, museum display, site-specificity, and television programming.
Some theater critics faulted Vostell for a shift from Happenings in the street to working
in the theater. One wrote, “by the end of the 60s, Happenings and provocative actions
were his specialty. Now Vostell, born in 1932, has become tame. Since 1971, the time of
dissent and protest has passed for the Berlin-based artist. He sees his work very

524
Ibid., 22-24.
525
Joseph Beuys, “Über Fernsehen und Videokunst: Gespräch mit Wulf Herzogenrath,”
in Videokunst in Deutschland 1963-1982: Videobänder, Videoinstallationen, Video-
Objekte, Videoperformances, Fotografien, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz,
1982), 94-98.
242
comfortably in museums and now ventures to step into the theater as a scenic artist.”
526

Another critic pointed to the irony of an artist like Vostell, who made a point of working
outside mainstream art institutions in the early 1960s, working for the historically
bourgeois institution and subscription audiences of the theater: “This extremely nuanced
approach of Mr. Vostell makes it very difficult to tell that what is shown is intended to be
a work of art and not mere participation in the power of consumer society.”
527

While it is true that Vostell’s work on Hamlet did not circumvent institutional or
market systems, as he otherwise did throughout his life, these criticisms also reflect the
critics’ own judgments of the theater a conservative institution. While the Schauspiel
Köln was among the most well-funded and thus mainstream theater houses in West
Germany, Vostell nonetheless made space for critique. He used the visual language of
video art and décollage-Happenings, which was largely foreign to this audience, to revive
one of the most revolutionary aesthetic ideas in theater history. The stage set
problematized the role of technology in society at large but also reminded audiences of a
utopian impulse folded into the creation of that technology in epic theater before it had
become a pernicious ideological tool. When Vostell returned projected and recorded
electronic images to the stage in 1979, they maintained neither the optimism Brecht and

526
“Happenings und provozierende Aktionen waren bis Ende der 60er Jahre seine
Spezialität. Jetzt ist Wolf Vostell, Jahrgang 1932, zahmer geworden. Die Zeit des
Neinsagens und des Protests ist für den seit 1971 in Berlin lebenden Künstler vorbei. Er
sieht seine Werke bestens in den Museen aufgehoben und wagt jetzt sogar als
Bühnenbildner den Schritt ins Theater.” Werner Krüger, “Sein ‘Hamlet’ endet mit der
Tagesschau” (1978).
527
“Diese außerordentlich feinsinnig nuancierende Betrachtungsweise macht einem beim
Anblick des Konterfeis von Herrn Vostell die Vorstellung ausgesprochen schwer, daß der
dargestellte Typ ein Kunstwerk und nicht ein Mitglied der kräftig konsumierenden
Gesellschaft sein soll.” Lisa Pohlmahn-Barth, “Feinsinnig nuanciert,” Stadt-Anzeiger (9
Jan 1979) in TWS.
243
Piscator described in the interwar period, nor the intoxicating effects that Nazi-era media
theorists anticipated. On Vostell’s stage, electronic technologies became self-critical tools
for illustrating the limits of their own exhaustion and abuse.

The Expanded Theater of Happenings and Fluxus

Fluxus and Happenings constitute a contentious episode in the history of art,
particularly when that history is seen in terms of art’s opposition to the theater. Vostell’s
interactions with artists in France, Germany, and the United States reveal a range of
attitudes toward theater among avant-garde artists, ranging from enthusiasm to disgust.
George Maciunas proclaimed himself the international chairman of Fluxus and was
cautious about how other artists used the term “Fluxus.”
528
In particular, he wanted
Fluxus events to maintain a conceptual distance from historically bourgeois formats such
as theater. In a 1963 letter to Vostell, Maciunas warned him that, “Fluxus rejects opera
and theater (Kaprow, Stockhausen etc.), which represent the institutionalizing of serious
art, and instead of opera and theater is for vaudeville or the circus, which represent a
more popular art form or totally nonartistic amusement (which have been considered

528
Maciunas is widely recognized as the founder of Fluxus, a title he aggressively
cultivated. See Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art
History to a Chronology of Fluxus (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2011). In 1963, Maciunas
became increasingly controlling and suspicious of Daniel Spoerri and Wolf Vostell’s
commitments to Fluxus. See Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas:
An Artist’s Biography (London and Bangkok: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 2007), 67, 87;
Maciunas and Vostell were described retrospectively as “archrivals” in Mr. Fluxus: a
Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, ed. Emmett Williams and Ann Noël (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1997), 81.
244
false by ‘cultivated’ intellectuals).”
529
Maciunas had hosted salon-style gatherings and
performances in New York before relocating to West Germany in 1961, where he joined
composers, musicians, visual artists, and other performers who were part of scenes
already established in Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Wuppertal.
530
Historians
have discussed theatrical elements of Fluxus performance such as scripts and audience
participation but have rarely acknowledged that Fluxus artists also accepted commissions
from theater houses.
531

Maciunas’ wanted Fluxus artists to adopt his stance of anti-Europeanism, which
he seems to have meant as an affront to historical notions of art and value. Not all Fluxus
artists subscribed to this view on either side of the Atlantic. In 1963, Maciunas distributed

529
Letter dated 3 November 1963, in Sohm Archive, reprinted in Noel and Williams, Mr.
Fluxus (1997), 41-2 and Günter Berghaus, Avant-garde Performance (2005), 118.
530
Maciunas moved with his family from Lithuania to Germany and then to the United
States, where he received artistic training at Cooper Union, the Carnegie Institute of
Technology, and New York University. He was in contact with Lithuanian émigrés and
avant-garde artists who were established in New York. When Maciunas moved to
Darmstadt, the roots of what would become Fluxus were already in place in the circle
around the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and artists La Monte Young, Wolf Vostell,
and Nam June Paik. See Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (2002), 11; Berghaus,
Avant-garde Performance (2005), 113-19; and Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus (2007).
531
Texts that deal with Fluxus and theatricality without addressing staged, scripted,
theater productions by Fluxus artists include Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre
(Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 98; Philip Auslander,
“Fluxus Art-Amusement: The Music of the Future?” in Contours of the Theatrical Avant-
Garde: Performance and Textuality, ed. James M. Harding (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 2000), 110-29; Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A
History (New York: Routledge, 2000); Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis,
Drama/Theatre/Performance (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2004), 90-94;
Peter Frank, “Ken Friedman: A Life in Fluxus,” in Artistic Bedfellows: Histories,
Theories, and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices, ed. Holly Crawford
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), 145-86; Mike Sell, Avant-Garde
Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre,
Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 2008), 141-166; and Natasha Lushetich, Fluxus: The Practice of Non-
Duality (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2014).
245
a manifesto that radicalized some of the central anti-art tenets of Dada and called for
artists to, “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional, and
commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract
art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, —purge the world of ‘Europeanism!’” Maciunas
later explained that he understood the concepts of the professionalized artist and
aestheticism as originating in Europe, and therefore was opposed to the other traditions
that grew out of those concepts.
532
Emmett Williams described how many Fluxus artists
took exception to this call, and “certainly none of the Europeans involved were anxious
to purge the world of Europeanism!”
533
Beuys, who was never entirely comfortable or
accepted among Fluxus artist, re-issued the manifesto in 1970, replacing the word
“European” with “American,” suggesting how the concepts Maciunas wanted oppose had
already been co-opted, digested, and modified in North American contexts.
534
Funding
structures played a role in this, as there were arguably less incentives to continue working
in the medium of theater in the United States where it was not publicly funded.
535
The
European visual and performance artists who worked as theater set designers were able to
rely on steady income during the period of production and rehearsal.

532
Maciunas to Tomas Schmit in a letter dated January 1964, in Jon Hendricks, What’s
Fluxus? What’s Not! Why (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco Do Brasil, 2002), 163.
533
Emmett Williams, My Life In Flux - and Vice Versa (London: Thames and Hudson,
1992), 39.
534
See Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Lebanon, NH:
University Press of New England, 2010), 106.
535
By the late 1970s, West Germany’s regional governments were spending about $18 on
theater, ballet, and opera per capita, compared to roughly $1 in the United States. See
Thomas R. H. Havens, Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan: Dance, Music, Theater, and
the Visual Arts, 1955-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 101 and Elain
Harwood, “Theatres in West Germany, 1945-70” in Setting the Scene: Perspectives in
Twentieth-Century Theatre Architecture, ed. Alistair Fair (Farnham, Surrey and
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 103-32.
246
Germany’s long history of avant-garde theater intersecting with avant-garde
visual art was reflected in postwar discourse. Between 1960 and 1970, Das Kunstwerk
featured articles on Oskar Kokoschka’s theater set designs, Yves Klein’s contribution to
the Gelsenkirchener Theater, Bauhaus Theater, painting at the Ballets Russes, and theater
developments in Moscow.
536
In these pages, the critic Lil Picard, who had a background
in cabaret, described Joseph Cornell’s boxes as “miniature theaters.”
537
Der Spiegel,
included several articles on stage set and costume designs by the artist Niki de Saint
Phalle, in both the theater and art sections of the magazine.
538
One of the most prolific
German artists and critics of the period, Bazon Brock, briefly worked in the theater.
539

Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg were also discussed in terms of their
theatricality.
540
The growing emphasis on the performative, broadly conceived, also led to
a new theater section in the West German journal Art and Literature (Kunst und
Literatur) in the mid-1970s.
While West Germany had its own critical discourse on contemporary art, with
figures like Brock, Piccard, and Imdahl, the American discourse was not foreign to
Germans. The Cologne-based magazine Kunstforum International, for instance, ran the
article, “A Propos Cement Greenberg” in 1974. The author, Willi Bongard, mocked
Greenberg for using “‘taste,’ or rather his ‘good taste’” (‘Geschmack’, genauer, seinen

536
Das Kunstwerk 14.4 (Oct 1960), 14.7 (Jan 1961), 19.7 (Jan 1966), 22.9-10 (Jun-Jul
1969), and 23.1-2 (Oct-Nov 1969).
537
Das Kunstwerk 15.5-6 (Nov-Dec 1961).
538
Der Spiegel 13.20 (Mar 1966); 27.20 (Jun 1966); and 41.20 (Oct 1966).
539
Brock worked briefly with Daniel Spoerri at the Landestheater in Darmstadt in 1958.
See Brock and Nicola von Velsen, Bazon Brock: Ästhetik gegen erzwungene
Unmittelbarkeit. Die Gottsucherbande, Schriften 1978-1986 (Cologne: DuMont
Buchverlag, 1986), 144.
540
Pierre Restany, “Die Beseelung des Objektes,” Das Kunstwerk 15.1-2 (Jul/Aug 1961):
38-40; and Das Kunstwerk 19.9 (Mar 1966): 30.
247
‘guten Geschmack’) as a determinant for critical and historical analysis.
541
The author
especially questioned Greenberg’s focus on painting to the exclusion of other media:
“Under the sharp guillotine of his merciless criticism have come not only the
representatives of the New Realism and Pop Art, but also the Minimalist, Process, and
certainly the Conceptual artists, almost all new art of the 60s and 70s.”
542
Bongard
offered West Germans a view of American criticism as formalist, judgmental, obsessed
with medium purity, and averse to process- and narrative-based art.
The height of the debate between theatricality’s defenders and detractors between
the mid-1960s and 1970s coincided with the period when Vostell traveled regularly to the
United States where the issue was particularly contested. North American critic Michael
Fried wrote in 1967 that modern “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of
theatre.”
543
Max Kozloff responded by calling Fried’s anti-theatrical derision
“cosmetic.”
544
In 1974, art historian Adrian Henri observed, “Happenings have thus been
drawing closer to theatre; and the theatre in turn has been so much influenced by the
‘alogical’ aspect of happenings that it is often hard to see where one ends and the other

541
Willi Bongard, “A Propos Clement Greenberg,” Kunstforum International 11
(Oct/Nov 1974): 110-12. Bongard also wrote “Leben mit Pop, Op, und Ob,” Die Zeit (9
July 1965).
542
“Unter das scharfe Fallbeil seiner unbarmherzigen Kritik sind nicht nur die Vertreter
des Nouveau Realisme und der Pop Art, sondern auch die Minimal-, die Prozess- und erst
recht die Concept-Künstler geraten, mithin fast alle neue Kunst der 60er und 70er Jahre.”
Willi Bongard, “A Propos Clement Greenberg” (1974), 112.
543
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (Summer 1967): 12-23 and Clement
Greenberg, “Intermedia” Arts 56.2 (October 1981): 92-93.
544
Max Kozloff, “Happenings: The Theater of Mixed Means,” The Nation (3 July 1967),
reprinted in Renderings: Critical Essays on a Century of Modern Art [1961] (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1968), 236.
248
begins.”
545
Krauss claimed in 1977, “Now it is beyond question that a large number of
postwar European and American sculptors became interested both in theater and in the
extended experience of time which seemed part of the conventions of the stage.”
546

New York-based artists Higgins and Kaprow were exposed to avant-garde theater
both locally and in Europe.
547
Nevertheless, like Maciunas, they maintained a discursive
tension between theater, on the one hand, and Fluxus (Higgins) and Happenings
(Kaprow) on the other. Higgins claimed, “We need more portability and flexibility, and
this the traditional theater cannot provide.”
548
While “multi media” refers to the co-
existence of different media, “intermedia” pertains to artworks in which individual media
cannot be distilled.
549
Concrete poetry, for instance, is “intermedial” because it
supercedes existing categories such as the linguistic and the visual and makes a new one.
By excluding theater from the realm of intermediality, which the Happening supposedly

545
Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974),
86.
546
Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), 204. Krauss nevertheless denounced
the “rampant impurity” of Fluxus.” See “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of
the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 33.
547
Kaprow must have been aware of genre and medium-defying theater works through
his acquaintance with Richard Schechner of the Performance Group and his teacher John
Cage’s collaborations with The Living Theatre. See Erika Munk, “The Living Theatre:
Historical Overview,” in Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies, ed.
James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
2006/2009), 28; Roy Kotynek and John Cohassey, American Cultural Rebels: Avant-
Garde and Bohemian Artists, Writers and Musicians from the 1850s through the 1960s
(Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2008), 193; and Richard Schechner, “Extensions
in Time and Space. An Interview with Allan Kaprow,” The Drama Review 12.3 (Spring
1968), 158.
548
Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34.1 (2001): 52. Originally published in
Something Else Newsletter 1, No. 1 (Something Else Press, 1966). Also published in
Dick Higgins, Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
549
The term “intermediality” comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lecture No. 3, On
Edmund Spencer,” [1812] reprinted in Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, T. M.
Raysor, ed. (London: Constable, 1936), 35.
249
exemplified, Higgins missed an opportunity to demonstrate the post-medium position he
claimed to stake out for Fluxus.
550
Higgins’ exaggerated rhetoric helped him argue
elsewhere that “the happening developed as an intermedium, an uncharted land that lies
between collage, music and the theater. It is not governed by rules.”
551

In Kaprow’s 1976 essay, “Nontheatrical Performance,” he wrote, “By the early
sixties the more experimental Happenings and Fluxus events had eliminated not only
actors, roles, plots, rehearsals, and repeats, but also audiences, the single staging area, and
the customary time block of an hour or so. These are the stock-in-trade of any theater,
past or present.”
552
Theater productions in Germany and across Europe at that very
moment—several discussed in the next chapter—were re-introducing the use of multiple
stage areas and running four to five hours. Kaprow was right that performance artists in
the United States and Western Europe broke with traditional theatrical devices but he
seems to have overlooked a similar move within the institution of theater around the same
time.
553
Theater and art discourses in Germany, by contrast, were quite aware of Kaprow.
Theater historian Robert Moran describes how in the 1970s, Kaprow’s work “continued

550
Peter Boenisch, Rosemary Klich, and Edward Scheer argue that, “most of those
involved in the discussion of ‘intermediality’ at the time of Higgins and the Fluxus
movement adhered to the formula ‘theatre + (other) media = intermedial theatre,’ and as
such, implicitly propagated the notion of media specificity.” Multimedia Performance
(2012), 72. See also Peter Boenisch, “coMEDIA electrONica: Performing Intermediality
in Contemporary Theatre,” Theatre Research International 28.1 (2003): 35.
551
Dick Higgins, “Intermedia” in Horizons (1984), 22.
552
Allan Kaprow, “Nontheatrical Performance” [1976] in Essays on the Blurring of Art
and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1993), 173.
553
The assumption that theater stayed the same while the art world moved around it is
complicated by New York-baed groups such as The Open Theater, The Living Theatre,
The Bread and Puppet Theater, The Performance Group, and The Wooster Group. In
West Germany, experimental groups staging sight-specific, participatory, and unscripted
pieces include the Jugendklub kritisches Theater in Cologne, Stuttgart, Bremen, and
Essen, and street theater groups such as Theater Unterwegs in Cologne and Munich.
250
to flourish in Europe – particularly in Germany.”
554
The German art historian Wolf
Rainer Wendt included Kaprow in a 1970 study of the readymade and, as Timothy Scott
Brown shows in his study of postwar West German culture, “the happening quickly
jumped the tracks of the art world to become a standard part of the repertoire of the
cultural underground.”
555

Higgins and Kaprow, for all their reluctance to let their work be called “theater,”
continually referred back to it. It functioned in many of their writings as an unexamined
rhetorical straw man. Kaprow chose the term “Happening” specifically to avoid
associations with the theater.
556
Higgins likewise considered theater to be his foundation:
“Starting from the idea of theater itself, others such as myself declared war on the script
as a set of sequential events.”
557
Even if Higgins and Kaprow considered theater
outmoded, they still saw in it the potential to completely rewrite the nature of exchange
between art and public. Having gone to great lengths to circumvent the art market and
gallery system (Higgins more than Kaprow), they found themselves in a field of cultural
production that included not only object-makers, but also electronic music composers,
dancers, actors, and theater directors. They were not about to be co-opted by yet another
historically bourgeois cultural institution; using “theater” to stand in for high culture in
their statements was in part a defense mechanism against this institutionalization.

554
Robert C. Morgan, “Thoughts on Re-Performance, Experience, and Archivism,” PAJ:
A Journal of Performance and Art 32.3 (September 2010): 11.
555
Wolf Rainer Wendt, Ready-Made: Das Problem und der philosophische Begriff des
ästhetischen Verhaltens, dargestellt an Marcel Duchamp (Meisenhaeim am Glan: Verlag
Anton Hain, 1970), 85; Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The
Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2013),
199-200.
556
Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of
Happenings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 9.
557
Ibid.
251
Others sought not to attack theater, but to co-opt and change it to meet their ends.
Dancers were among the most instrumental in expanding the term “theater” in the United
States and West Germany. In 1965 Higgins claimed, “Even the best of the traditional
theater is no longer found on Broadway but at the Judson Memorial Church, some miles
away.”
558
The Judson Dance Theater began organizing performances in 1962, which
incorporated John Cage’s anti-compositional techniques, Merce Cunningham’s
vocabulary of movement, and works by contemporary visual artists.
559
In 1973 when the
German choreographer Pina Bausch took over the Wuppertaler Ballet, she renamed the
company Tanztheater Wuppertal, meaning “dance-theater.”
560
Bausch drew directly on
theatrical precursors such as Brecht and The Living Theatre but also took liberties in
redefining the theater format.
561
The term “dance-theater” was used in the 1970s in a
variety of contexts in and outside Germany, sometimes maintaining dramatic elements
such as character development but nevertheless proposing that theater need not be
scripted, spoken, or narrative.
Fluxus and Happenings artists partook of this expanded discourse of theater by
staging participatory, non-scripted performances while also employing theatrical lighting,
programs, and curtains.
562
Artists such as Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Filliou, and George

558
Higgins, “Intermedia,” (2001), 50.
559
Ramsay Burt, Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2006), 44-6.
560
The term Tanztheater first developed in the post-WWI years and is linked to German
expressionist dance and the dancer-choreographer Kurt Jooss. See Suzanne Schlicher,
“The West German Dance Theatre: Paths from the Twenties to the Present,” The Dance
Theatre of Kurt Jooss, special issue, Choreography and Dance 3.2 (1993): 25-44.
561
Royd Climenhaga, ed., The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), 3, 9.
562
For example, Willem de Ridder and George Maciunas’ Fluxus Festival in 1963 took
place at Hypokriterion Theater in Amsterdam, Nam June Paik performed at Cologne’s
252
Brecht used the term “theater” to refer to events off-stage and outside the theater.
563

When Kaprow used the term “theater” he was referring not to the institution but to this
more abstract sense: “A Pentagon meeting is theatre. A guy digging a great tunnel
underneath the river is a form of theatre. If we go into it that way, then of course my own
pieces are theatre.”
564
Though not a linear chronology, the term “theater” developed in
the United States and West Germany from an unmentionable taboo in the North
American context to being polemical but more widely used in a transatlantic context.
Vostell’s Hamlet stands out within this history because—unlike Bausch’s dance-theater
or Paik and Kaprow’s Happenings-as-theater—Vostell engaged with the institution itself
and its customary ticketing mechanisms and rehearsal schedules. Within the context of
his works such as Theater is in the Street and other Fluxus events, Vostell’s decision to
accept the commission appeared conservative to some theater critics. To his colleagues

Theater am Dom in 1961, Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell presented their lecture “The
Art of the Happening” in 1964 at Cricket Theater, and La Monte Young performed a
couple works the same year at Pocket Theater, both in New York City. See Christophe
Cherix, In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976 (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 153; Berghaus, Avant-garde Performance (2005), 123;
and Geoffrey Hendricks, ed., Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance,
Intermedia, and Rutgers University 1958-1972 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2003), 188.
563
Vautier, Filliou, and George Brecht developed performance pieces with adaptable
scripts. Ben Vautier painted a truck with the words “THEATRE D’ART TOTAL” and
founded the experimental Theatre Total performance group in 1963. Owen Smith,
“Developing a Fluxable Forum,” in Ken Friedman, The Fluxus Reader (Chichester, UK
and New York: Academy Editions, 1998), 10. Nam June Paik’s Moving Theater (c. 1964)
entails: “Fluxus fleet of cars and trucks drives into crowded city during rush hour. At the
appointed time, all drivers stop cars, turn off engines, get out of cars, lock doors, take
keys and walk away.” Dorothee Richter, Fluxus. Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um
Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeindschaft, Diss: Bremen University
(Berlin and Stuttgart: Biotop 3000, 2012), 138 and Ken Friedman, “Events and the
Exquisite Corpse” in Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom
Denlinger, eds., The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor
Games (Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 64.
564
Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968), 117.
253
involved in these alternative forms of theater, however, it might also have seemed a
radical and final rejection of Maciunas’ censure against theater (Maciunas died in spring
1978 a few months before Vostell began working on Hamlet).
Aside from Heyme’s commission from Vostell, two other high profile theater
directors in West Germany commissioned artists associated with Fluxus to collaborate on
projects that help to contextualize Hamlet. Director Claus Peymann worked with Joseph
Beuys on a staging that combined scripts by Shakespeare and Goethe and Peter Zadek
commissioned three stage designs from the artist Daniel Spoerri. The first requires
backtracking to 1969. On May 29 and 30 of that year, Beuys appeared in Frankfurt am
Main at the third annual theater festival Experimenta to perform a new piece, Titus
Andronicus/Iphiginie (fig. 14).
565
Only two figures were visible on the darkened stage of
the Theater am Turm, a white horse and the artist. Wearing a long fur coat and felt hat,
Beuys paced about, feeding sugar to the horse, coughing rhythmically, making chalk
illustrations on the stage floor, playing clash cymbals, and reading passages into a
microphone from Shakespeare's bloody Titus Andronicus (c. 1592) and Goethe's
Iphigenia in Tauris (1779).
566
Loudspeakers broadcast recordings of the two texts recited
by the prominent theater director Claus Peymann and dramaturge Wolfgang Wiens.

565
These observations on Titus Andronicus/Iphiginie are based on a video of the
performance televised on June 10, 1969 over Hessischen Rundfunk and seen at the
Kunstmuseum in Bonn in February 2014.
566
Texts that describe the performance without mentioning theater, theatricality, staging,
or Shakespeare include Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 13-14; Hans-Jürgen Kutzner, Liturgie als
Performance?: Überlegungen zu einer künstlerischen Annäherung (Münster: LIT Verlag,
2007), 145; Susan Melrose in Stuart Slim, ed., The Routledge Companion to
Postmodernism, 3
rd
Edition (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2011), 198; and
Thierry de Duve, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Pres, 2012), 1.
254
Beuys simultaneously read the same passages slightly out of sync with the recordings and
interwove Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s contrasting tales through ritualistic actions such as
banging together crash symbols and feeding the horse.
Beuys’ posturing as a shaman or ritual healer has been critiqued for the way in
which it uses myth and spirituality to offer a creatively falsified version of Germany’s
past and the artist’s own history. The scholar Mark Taylor, however, submits that
whether or not one thinks of Beuys as a shaman, his incorporation of animals into
performance, specifically the horse, was connected to spiritual beliefs from Central Asia
that hold those animals to be mediators between the realms of the dead and the living:
“Whenever stags or horses appear in Beuys’s art, the range of connotations and
associations they bear is borrowed from the role they play in shamanistic rituals.”
567

Beuys’ performances, and particularly this iconic one, developed visual tropes that other
artists recycled and cited in various performance pieces, whether or not they maintained
Beuys’ mystical or political significances.
The theater critics who reviewed the Cologne Hamlet made fascinating guesses
about what a horse carcass was doing on stage, ranging from associations with Fortinbras
to Germany’s ecological movement. Vostell never pinned down a single reading, but the

567
See Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy
(New York, Columbia University Press, 2012), 24-25. The shamanistic view of Beuys is
upheld in texts such as Mariko Namba Walter and Eva Jane Neumann Fridman, Eds.,
Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture, Vol. 1 (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 26. Other texts, many of which emerged in the 1980s
and 1990s, distance Beuys from the concept of shamanism or critique it: Caroline Tisdall,
Joseph Beuys (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 23; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
“Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol: Preliminary Notes for a Critique,” Artforum (Jan 1980):
35-43; David Adams, “Review: Joseph Beuys,” Art Journal 50.1 (Spring 1991): 96-98;
Robert J. Wallis, Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies and
Contemporary Pagans (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 45-62; and Gillian
Whitely, “Joseph Beuys,” Anarchist Studies 22.2 (2014): 115-17.
255
use of animals and living bodies as display pieces, and even as art objects, had become a
common practice within installation practices Vostell would have seen over the preceding
two decades. The animal in gallery spaces registered a shift from a high modernist notion
of the static, flat, artwork, to one that is affective, and perhaps live or narrative. Robert
Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat in the “flatbed” painting, Monogram (1955-1959) was a
dramatic example of this when first exhibited in New York at Castelli Gallery in 1959.
568
In 1961, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni began signing people’s bodies, designating them
Living Works of Art, and placed human subjects on pedestals where they were
documented and became Living Sculptures.
569
In the performance Mon Fils (1968), the
Argentine-French artist Lea Lublin exhibited herself caring for her infant in the Musée
d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
570
In January 1969, the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis
exhibited twelve live horses spaced evenly around the walls and tied to the perimeter with
rope in the basement of Galleria L’Attico in Rome.
571
In fact, Kounellis, who remarked in

568
Kirsten Swenson, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 175f26 and Leo Steinberg, “The
Flatbed Picture Plane,” in Other Criteria (London and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972), 61-98.
569
Given the signed “Declaration of Authenticity” that Manzoni issued alongside this
gesture, it seems he was not offering art as a theatrical experience, and thus a
dematerialization of the art object, so much as turning the body into an art object and
assuming a Duchampian position by naming it as such. Gerald Silk, “All by Myself:
Piero Manzoni’s Autobiographical Use of His Body, Its Parts, and Its Products,” in True
Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern, ed. G. Thomas Couser and
Joseph Fichtelberg (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 139.
570
Cornelia H. Butler, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum
of Contemporary Art, 2007), 262.
571
The work, Untitled (Cavalli), was re-staged for the 1976 Venice Biennale and is still
repeated today. Kounellis also incorporated a live parrot into a 1967 installation and
another horse into a performance (Untitled) at Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1974.
Stephen Bann, Jannis Kounellis (London: Reaktion, 2003), 102; Kristine Stiles,
“Process,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter
Selz (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 585;
256
1972 that, “One needs to consider that the gallery is a dramatic, theatrical cavity,” even
performed with Vostell in the 1973 and 1974 Berlin exhibitions Aktionen der
Avantgarde.
572

While Vostell’s closed-circuit video loop seemed more startling and politically
engaged on stage than it might have in a gallery in 1979, the horse was an element that
conversely registered, even for theater audiences, as a contemporary artistic trope through
their knowledge of Beuys. In the performance, How to Explain Pictured to a Dead Hare
(wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt; 1965), Beuys sat in the gallery window
with his back toward onlookers outside, cradling a dead rabbit in his arms and speaking
to it. Images of this performance had become so well known in Germany that at least two
theater critics immediately understood Vostell’s horse carcass through the Beuysian
imagery. One remarked: “With Beuys it would have been a hare.”
573
Another noted,
“And the horse? As Heyme takes after [Peter] Zadek’s fame, so Vostell takes after
Beuys’ dead hare.”
574
Like Zadek, Heyme also borrowed an aesthetic idea from
contemporary art to update a hallowed script. If the display of animals and human bodies
in galleries in the 1960s and 1970s were intended as anti-art gestures, that strategy
ironically became a quintessential reference to art when transported to the theater.

Gillian Perry and Paul Wood, Themes in Contemporary Art (New Haven: Yale
University Press and Milton Keynes, UK: The Open University, 2004), 204.
572
Willoughby Sharp, “Structure and Sensibility: An Interview with Jannis Kounellis,”
Avalanche 5 (Summer 1972): 21. See also The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology,
ed. Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), xii.
573
“Bei Beuys wäre es wahrscheinlich einziger Hase.” Eo Plunien, “Wolf Vostell pudert
ein totes Pferd: Kölner Schauspielhaus: Ein Video-Hamlet als Abschiedsvorstellung des
bisherigen Intendanten,” Die Welt (19 Feb 1979) in TWS.
574
“Und das Pferd? Den Heyme ließ der Ruhm Zadeks, den Vostell der tote Hase von
Beuys nicht schlafen.” Hannes Schmidt, “‘Hamlet’ als Vostell-Happening in Köln”
(1979) in ibid.
257

Authorship in Daniel Spoerri’s Stage Work

The Romanian-born artist Daniel Spoerri (b. Daniel Isaak Feinstein, 1930)
designed three stage sets for Zadek at theaters throughout West Germany between 1974
and 1979. As a signatory of the 1960 Nouveau Réaliste manifesto and a contributor to
Fluxus events internationally, Spoerri’s stage work joins Vostell’s Hamlet in a class of
scenic projects rooted in an abject, anti-art aesthetic. Spoerri gained recognition as a
sculptor, publisher of multiples, and organizer of culinary-artistic events in the 1960s and
1970s, but before he developed a visual art practice, his professional life was on stage.
575

He began working as a ballet dancer in Switzerland, holding the position of premier
danseur at the Bern Opera from 1954 to 1957.
576
He soon tired of the repertory pieces
there and began staging works at the Berner Kellertheater. Based on the positive
reception of those productions, Spoerri was invited to the post of assistant director at the
Landestheater Darmstadt under Gustav Sellner from 1957 to 1959.
577
In 1956 he
produced the world premiere of Pablo Picasso’s wartime play, Desire Caught by The Tail

575
While Spoerri did sign Restany’s Nouveau Réalisme manifesto, not all accounts
consider him a Fluxus artist. His Fluxus credentials include publishing An Anecdoted
Topography of Chance (New York: Something Else Press, 1966) with Higgins’ Fluxus
press; Fluxus artist Jon Hendricks commented that, “Eating as a form of art… was also an
idea of Spoerri’s that Fluxus adopted” in Jon Hendricks, “Daniel Spoerri,” in A. Bonito
Oliva, Ubi Fluxus ibi motus (1990), 262, re-printed in David Joselit, “The Readymade
Metabolized: Fluxus in Life,” in Res 63/64 (Spring/Autumn 2013): 193; a rift between
Maciunas and Spoerri is among the reasons that Spoerri is excluded from some Fluxus
histories.

See Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (2010), 122; Cornelia
Lauf even labeled Spoerri a “Fluxus detractor” in “Fluxus Soapbox,” in Sculpture and the
Vitrine, ed. John C. Welchman (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 185.
576
Dorothee Richter, Fluxus. Kunst gleich Leben? (2012), 133.
577
Berghaus, “Happenings in Europe” (1995), 285.
258
(Le Désir attrapé par la queue), and staged Jean Tardieu’s script for The Sonata and the
Three Gentlemen, or How to Speak Music (La sonate et les trios messieurs, ou comment
parler musique) and Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve).
578

Neither in Bern nor in Darmstadt was Spoerri able to find supporters and
collaborators with whom to create his most inventive stage ideas, including a production
of Tristan Tzara’s Dada play Gas Heart (Le Coeur a gaz).
579
The Bauhaus Theater in
Ulm also rejected Spoerri’s proposal for an “abstract theater,” though he did publish two
related articles, “Example of a Dynamic Theatre” and “On the Auto-Theatre.”
580
In
Spoerri's notes for an “Autotheater” he laid out sixteen guidelines for a hypothetical event
in which the audience would read texts into a microphone, trigger lighting and musical
cues at the press of a button, tote around unwieldy objects, and build and deconstruct
furniture pieces.
581
The audience members were to be actors, assuming not roles but pre-
determined actions. Autotheater’s open-ended experience stems from Spoerri’s
discussions about automated, kinetic, and staged works with Duchamp, Robert Filliou,
Dieter Roth, Jean Tinguely, and others.
582

Art historians have largely disregarded Spoerri’s engagement with theater. In
some instances, it is simply cut out of his biography. Other accounts mention Spoerri’s

578
Mariellen R. Sanford, ed., Happenings and Other Acts (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995), 336; Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-
avant-garde: Topographies of Chance and Return (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2010), 147-8f12.
579
Spoerri did eventually produce Tzara's Gas Heart at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus
in 1972. See Daniel Spoerri: Werke 1960-2001 (Bielefeld: Kerberos Verlag, 2001), 114.
580
Berghaus, “Happenings in Europe” (1995), 285. Daniel Spoerri, “Autotheater,” in
ZERO [1958/1961] (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 218-19.
581
Spoerri, “Autotheater,” (1973), 219.
582
Filliou dedicated his first work of visual art to Spoerri, a 1967 score for a theater piece
titled L’Immortelle Mort du Monde (The Deathless Dying of the World), HAM 2006.284.
259
theater background in passing.
583
Spoerri is better known for his tableaux-pièges (“snare
pictures” or “trap paintings” in English and “Falenbilder” in German). They are
assemblages that begin as performative events, usually involving food. Following a meal,
Spoerri fixed the remnants to the table around which the participants gathered and tilted
the surface vertically to create a wall-mounted tableau. Most museum exhibitions of the
artist focus on the snare pictures because, despite the myriad conservation issues they
present, they are easier to exhibit than his restaurant ventures or theater set designs and fit
securely within existing art-historical narratives of Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus.
584
In
art history sourcebooks, one reads that Spoerri began the snare pictures in 1958, founded
a multiples press in 1959, Editions MAT (Multiplication d’Art Transformable), and his
signed the Nouveau Réalisme manifesto in 1960.
585
More substantial accounts consider
his “gastronomical art” pieces such as Restaurant Spoerri (Düsseldorf, 1968-1971) and
Eat-Art Gallery (Düsseldorf, 1970-1971).
586
Spoerri returned to the world of German
theater, however, in 1973, after meeting Peter Zadek at the annual festival, Berlin
Theatertreffen.
587
Of Spoerri and Zadek’s three stage collaborations, the one most
relevant to the aesthetics of Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, and the Happening, was The

583
Laura Iansini, “Basel: Daniel Spoerri,” Sculpture 21.5 (1 June 2002): 77.
584
One of the first museum exhibitions to include a full replica of one of the artist’s
immersive environments was “Daniel Spoerri—Metteur en scène d’objects” at the
Museum Jean Tinguely in 2001.
585
See Stiles and Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (2006), 284-5.
586
Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: from Futurist Cooking to Eat Art
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 145.
587
The Nazis chased both Spoerri and Zadek out of their homes and they bonded in
Berlin over the German public’s ironic accusations that Zadek’s portrayal of Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice was anti-Semitic. See Elisabeth Plessen, ed., Peter Zadek und
seine Bühnenbildner (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2012), 56. See also Wilhelm
Hortmann, “Shakespeare on the Political Stage in the Twentieth Century,” in Wells and
Stanton, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (2002), 220.
260
Winter’s Tale in 1978.
588
Additionally, they staged Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel
Professor Unrat (Small Town Tyrant), at the Schauspielhaus Bochum in 1974 and
adapted Molière’s 1666 play The Misanthrope (Das Menschenfeind) at the Freie
Volksbühne in West Berlin in 1979.
589

Zadek and Spoerri’s The Winter’s Tale premiered in September 1978 at the
Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg with a running time of five hours.
590
The set design
did not engage with electronic imaging technologies as Vostell’s did, but it did bring
elements of tactility and chance to the stage, which were fundamental for Nouveau
Réalisme and Fluxus events, and which Zadek appreciated in Spoerri’s sculptural practice
before approaching him. In the third act, Shakespeare calls for an idyllic landscape in
Bohemia, but also for a shipwreck, a sea, a desert, and a shepherd. For these scenes
Spoerri distributed one thousand cans of guar gum (described in archival materials as
“slime”) over the stage floor, making the actors slow their movements (fig. 15).
591
Some
props and actors became stuck to the gooey stage, which forced upon the actors elements
of tactility and chance that were crucial to the feasts and food games Spoerri orchestrated
in galleries.
The major difference between Spoerri and Vostell’s stage work has to do with

588
This is also the only theater production that appears in Spoerri’s chronology section in
Suzanne Neuburger, Nouveau Réalisme (2005), 198.
589
ADK Peter Zadek Archiv, Professor Unrat, Bochum, 1974 and ADK Franz Gauker
Sammlung, Menschenfeind, Berlin, 1979. See also Daniel Spoerri, Anekdotomania:
Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 53; and Peter Zadek, Die
heissen Jahre 1970-1980 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2006), 205.
590
ADK Peter Zadek Archiv, Das Wintermärchen, Hamburg, 1978.
591
Holger Schnitgerhans and Gisela Scheidler, “Zirkus Zadek ist wieder da,” Die Zeit
Magazin 37.8 (Sept 1978): 27 in ADK Peter Zadek Archiv, Das Wintermärchen,
Hamburg, 1978. There is no reference in the archive to the source of the cans of slime but
beginning in 1976, the toy company Mattel began producing such a product.
261
their attitudes toward authorship and controlling the narrative of their art. Spoerri insisted
that his theatrical work was not part of his oeuvre but rather of the director’s: “An artist,
such as Mr. [Wolf] Vostell for example, inserted himself as an artist working within the
theater. The work later became a work of his… By contrast, I consider myself secondary
to the director.”
592
In Spoerri’s “Autotheater,” he encouraged the use of props but strictly
ruled out, “objets d’art or anything that by its aesthetic appearance could be valued as
such.”
593
For him, stage pieces, no matter how belabored, were not art objects. Vostell, by
contrast, understood his invitation to work in the theater as pivotal within histories of art
and theater alike, claiming, “I call it the first electronic Hamlet in history.”
594

Conclusion: Survivals of the Avant-Garde

From Heartfield in 1920 to Vostell in 1979, and many after and in between,
cutting-edge technologies were mobilized on stage in a way that is unique to the theater’s
lighting and mechanical requirements. The projected image, the film montage, and the
manipulated TV screen and closed-circuit video loop, when used as avant-garde media on
stage, have carried a self-reflexive criticality of their own potentials and limits.
595
Peter

592
From an interview with Elisabeth Plessen on 11 Oct 2011 in Plessen, Peter Zadek und
seine Bühnenbildner (2012), 59. This stance is not unusual for scenic designers. Caspar
Neher, Wilfried Minks, and Achim Freyer are exceptional in the history of set design,
and were given prominence only because of particular circumstances relating to epic
theater or Director’s Theater.
593
Spoerri, “Autotheater” (1973), 19.
594
“Ich nenne ihn spontan den ersten ‘elektronischen Hamlet’ der Geschichte.” Wolf
Vostell, “Der Elektronische Hamlet” in Shakespeare Hamlet Heyme/Vostell (1979), 18.
595
For a technical descriptipn of these technologies in installation art, see “Closed Circuit
as an Open System,” in Slavko Kacunko, Culture as Capital: Selected Essays, 2011-2014
(Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2015), 25-28.
262
Bürger famously argued that art cannot be anti-institutional if it is to be exhibited and
discussed by the institutions of art, such as museums, galleries, and universities.
596
He
leaves room, however, for avant-garde visual art to resist commodification within the
institution of theater. Theater set designs are rarely ever bought or sold and therefore
have resisted market forces and institutionalization. Moholy-Nagy, Heartfield, and
Vostell’s sets have no museum accession numbers, no monographs, and no exhibition
histories. This type of object is large, difficult to store, and ephemeral or fragile. It is
rarely exhibited in museums and galleries and thus has also largely resisted examination

596
There are too many ways to list here in which Bürger’s arguments does an injustice to
artistic practice after World War II, and others have already done a sufficient job of
problematizing his central arguments. Benjamin Buchloh has dealt many blows to
Bürger. See for example “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm
Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37 (Summer 1986): 41-52 as well as
“Theorizing the Avant-Garde,” Art in America 72 (November 1984); Hal Foster argued
Bürger’s “narrative of direct cause and effect, of lapsarian before and after… will not
do,” in “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” October 70 (Fall 1994): 14; Brandon
Taylor, Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1995); Dietrich Scheunemann, ed., Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde (Amsterdam and New
York: Rodopi, 2005); David Hopkins and Anna Kathaina Schaffner, eds., Neo-Avant-
Garde (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2006). Further critiques of the
Eurocentrism and narrowly linear development implied by the term “historical avant-
garde” are discussed in James Harding and John Rouse, Not the Other Avant-Garde: The
Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2006); Mike Sell, ed., Avant-Garde Performance and Material
Exchange: Vectors of the Radical (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
Sell, The Avant-Garde: Race Religion War (London: Seagull Books, 2011); James
Harding, The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and
Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). For a discussion of the
impact on the theater of texts such as Mikhail Bakunin’s 1878 journal L’Avant Garde,
Renato Poggioli’s 1962 Theory of the Avant-Garde, and Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-
Garde (1974), see Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre 1892-1992 (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993) 1. These critiques are directed against Peter Bürger, Theory of
the Avant-Garde [1974], Michael Snow, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984) but also obliquely against the texts on which Bürger built, including Renato
Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde [1962], Gerald Fitzgerald, trans. (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1968); and Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism [1977] (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1987).
263
in the critical discourse on art, which has often been the first step toward being absorbed
by cultural institutions and markets.
One aspect of Bürger’s publication, which he himself does not focus on at all,
offers an unexpected contribution to this study, however, and that is the illustrations of
artworks. Incidentally, all of the examples of visual art reproduced in Bürger’s essay are
integral to the four chapters of this study, either because they are by artists who also
produced theater stage sets, or because they engaged with issues of appropriation and
have often been discussed alongside the others for that reason. What is really telling
about his selection of artworks to use as illustrations, is that all of the ones that stand in
for the “historical” avant-garde are by artists still active in the postwar period. In addition
to Picasso, who famously produced the stage sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes,
Heartfield is Bürger’s other major example of the historical avant-garde. Based on the
discussion, it seems highly unlikely that Bürger was aware of Heartfield’s postwar work
in East Germany. Warhol, Spoerri, and Duchamp are among Bürger’s postwar examples
of neo-avant-garde artists.
What is odd about the theatrical loophole in Bürger’s theory—that theater
continued to be a site of resistance to the culture industry after World War II via theories
and practitioners associated with the historical avant-garde—is that he was acutely aware
of theater. In fact, Brecht figures prominently in his theory. Bürger claimed that George
Lukács and Adorno “are incapable of understanding the most important materialist writer
of our time (Brecht).”
597
For Bürger, Brecht and historical avant-garde art constituted
overlapping affronts to autonomous art in bourgeois society. Brecht was Bürger’s literary

597
Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), 88.
264
equivalent of artists such as Heartfield and Magritte, except that, “Brecht never shared
the intention of the representatives of the historical avant-garde movements to destroy art
as an institution. Even the young Brecht who despised the theater of the educated
bourgeoisie did not conclude that the theater should be abolished altogether.”
598
Brecht
was committed to the transformation, not the overthrow, of the institution. This was an
important distinction for Bürger, who served Brecht a backhanded compliment, claiming,
“whereas the avant-gardistes believe they can directly attack and destroy that institution,
Brecht develops a concept that entails a change of function and sticks to what is
concretely achievable.”
599

Writing from West Germany, Bürger seems not to have been thinking of Brecht’s
contemporary work at the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin. In fact, one must question
whether a thesis such as Bürger’s would have been possible had he considered art across
the Berlin Wall. Bürger himself admitted in 2010 that East German art production was
not part of his purview: “In the image of artistic modernism that prevailed against
conservative resistance in the period after the Second World War, especially in West
Germany—I am thinking, for instance, of Hans Sedlmayer’s book Art in Crisis, The Lost
Center—movements intent on radical social change were largely blotted out.”
600
This
“blotting out” seems to have caused blind spots concerning both art made in East
Germany and the survival of interwar artists who worked there. Despite the ideological
constraints on East German artists, the collectivist, socialist, and anti-market ethos of the

598
Ibid.
599
Ibid., 89.
600
Peter Bürger, “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain
Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde,” trans. Bettina Brandt and Daniel Purdy, New
Literary History 41.4 (Fall 2010): 697.
265
East German culture constituted an aesthetic survival of the “historical” avant-garde that
theories of “neo” avant-gardes cannot accommodate. While Bürger limits Brecht’s reach
and the applicability of his methods to the pre-World War II period, there is ample
evidence in the productions discussed here that Brecht continued to be a presence in
postwar art production, and that his efforts to “change” rather than “negate” the
institution of theater continued under directors and artists in West Germany.
The historical avant-garde literally lived on in the postwar period, as figures such
as Brecht, Heartfield, Picasso, and Duchamp survived the war. The historical avant-
garde’s survival can also be understood affectively, as Pop art and Fluxus, two
international art movements of the postwar period that fit within Bürger’s schema of
“neo”-avant-garde, achieved at least a partial sublation of art and political life in their
Happenings and participatory stage works. Brecht’s influence continued to expand in the
polarized socialist/capitalist culture of divided German and Cold War Europe, especially
among a generation of artists and directors (Heyme, Zadek, Minks) for whom Brecht and
Piscator were either teachers, mentors, or assigned reading in school. According to Mike
Sell, “by 1968, the watershed year of the Situationist International, Happenings had more
or less disappeared from the scene. However, their apparent absence should not deceive
us, for their influence on subsequent theater and performance has been profound—as has
their influence on subsequent political organizing and demonstration.”
601
The contention
that the avant-garde tradition survived and even flourished in the 1960s and 1970s is not

601
Mike Sell, “The Avant-Garde of Absorption: Happenings, Fluxus, and the
Performance Economics of the American Sixties,” Rethinking Marxism 10.2 (Summer
1998): 23.
266
new.
602
What is new is a reading of electronic media on stage as pivotal within the long
history sketched here of the avant-garde, in the Weimar Period under Piscator and
Moholy-Nagy, in the 1950s under Brecht and Heartfield, and in the 1970s, under Vostell.

602
Hubert van den Berg identifies parallels between avant-gardes post-World War I and
post-1968. He also shows that Bürger based many of his conclusions about prewar Dada
on later accounts by Raoul Hausmann and Hans Richter that were skeptical of postwar
artists that used aesthetic strategies similar to their own. See “On the Historiographic
Distinction between Historical and Neo-avant-Garde,” in Scheunemann, Avant-
Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde (2005): 63-76.
267
Images to Chapter 3

FIG 1. Wolf Vostell and Hansgünther Heyme, Hamlet, Cologne, 1979

FIG 2. Wolf Vostell and Hansgünther Heyme, Hamlet, Cologne, 1979
268

FIG 3. Wolf Vostell and Hansgünther Heyme, Hamlet, Cologne, 1979

FIG 4. Wolf Vostell and Hansgünther Heyme, Hamlet, Cologne, 1979
269

FIG 5. The Wooster Group, Hamlet, Edinburgh International Festival, 2008

FIG 6a-c. Wolf Vostell, Black Room, 1958
270

FIG 7. Wolf Vostell, Coca-Cola, 1961

FIG 8. Wolf Vostell, Grasshoppers, 1969-1970

271

FIG 9. Wolf Vostell and Hansgünther Heyme, Hamlet, Cologne, 1979

FIG 10. Wolf Vostell and Hansgünther Heyme, Hamlet, Cologne, 1979
272
FIG 11. Francis Picabia, Relâche, Théâtre des Champs Élysées, Paris, 1924

FIG 12. Wolf Vostell and Hansgünther Heyme, Hamlet, Cologne, 1979
273

FIG 13. Vito Acconci, Command Performance, 112 Greene St, New York, 1974

FIG 14. Joseph Beuys and Claus Peymann, Titus Andronicus/Iphiginie, Frankfurt, 1969
274

FIG 15. Daniel Spoerri and Peter Zadek, The Winter’s Tale, Hamburg, 1978
275
Chapter 4
“Individual Mythologies” of Gallery and Stage

Wolf Vostell, born in 1932, claimed, “I lived my first happening when I was 8 or
9; during an air raid we had to run from the school into the landscape, with each child left
to hide themselves under trees on their own; from this viewpoint I saw the airplane
battles and bombs fall to the earth like a flock of birds.”
603
For Vostell’s generation of
artists in Germany, participatory Happenings and the immersive formats of installation
art were mechanisms for coming to terms with traumatic childhoods, repressed family
histories, and war-ravaged environments. That postwar performance and installation art
allowed artists to engage with childhood memories of total war and blitzkrieg
distinguishes the German context from the ludic dimension of Happenings that Allan
Kaprow, for instance, was arranging in New York. At the same time, contemporary
installation art and exhibitions had a decisive impact on West German theater staging and
design.
By the mid-1970s in West Germany, the curated gallery and the staged space of
theater shared visual devices for offering defamiliarized forms of figurative, three-
dimensional representations, such as assemblage art and life-size, figurative sculpture.
References to installation art on the theater stage coincided with a wave of site-specific
performances in abandoned and bombed structures across West Germany. By simulating
immersive, participatory, and often chaotic exhibition formats of the late 1960s and

603
Jürgen Becker and Wolf Vostell, eds., Happenings: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau
Réalisme. Eine Dokumentation (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Broschiert, 1965), 403, reprinted
in Claudia Mesch, “Vostell’s Ruins: dé-collage and the mnemotechnic space of the
postwar city,” Art History 23.1 (Mar 2000): 95-96.
276
1970s in theater productions, central figures in Director’s Theater forged new
relationships between their actors, audiences, and the difficult moments in history that a
given site represented.
This chapter focuses on three types of site-specific theater that demonstrate, as in
the previous chapters, the way in which Director’s Theater politicized and narrativized
postwar artistic forms in a way the gallery could not. These three types are: alternative
locations within the theater house itself, locations with Nazi pasts, and post-industrial
spaces. Although the organization of this chapter is thematic rather than chronological,
most productions premiered in a fairly condensed period between 1977 and 1978 and can
thus be seen as sharing the same historical moment within West German history. Rather
than montage, Pop art, video art, Nouveau Réalisme, or Fluxus, the artistic mode that
directors turned to in these instances was that of installation art and contemporary
curatorial practice.
In addition to moving to alternative locations entirely, some theaters moved the
action off stage, into new parts of the theater building. For a 1971 production of Peer
Gynt in West Berlin, director Peter Stein and designer Karl-Ernst Herrmann rebuilt the
Schaubühne’s theater space as an arena. The dramaturge suggested that the stage and
figures be made to resemble installations by the American artist Edward Kienholz,
prompting the designers to adopt Kienholz’s grotesque, visceral style through masks and
scenery. The other production of this type I will discuss is Faust I and Faust II, which
director Claus Peymann and designer Achim Freyer (b. 1934; a student of Brecht’s)
staged on back-to-back nights in Stuttgart in 1977. On the second night, they surprised
the audience by staging two scenes in the foyer, where the paying spectators became
277
extras in the action. Not only did Peymann and Freyer model one scene after an
installation they saw at the Venice Biennale, but Freyer was also simultaneously
preparing an immersive installation for the upcoming documenta exhibition. The
productions of Peer Gynt and Faust offer a view into how theater professionals
understood contemporary installation art through Brecht’s theory of defamiliarization and
re-installed theatrical variations of that art in spaces within the theater building. The
Faust production in particular, with spectators throwing objects across the lobby and
interjecting vocally, achieved a level of spectator-involvement that rarely occurred in the
gallery installations on which it was, in part, based.
We then move to two productions that were staged in locations with explicit links
to Nazism. The director Klaus Michael Grüber staged poetic fragments by the Romantic
writer, Hölderlin, in Hitler’s 1936 Olympiastadion (Olympic Stadium) on two freezing
nights in December 1977. The production, “Winterreise,” was rife with allusions to
Germany’s Romantic and Nazi histories. Grüber’s designer, Antonio Recalcati, exhibited
his paintings at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and in the inaugural exhibition of the Centre
Georges Pompidou in Paris in January 1977. Within the Olympiastadion, Recalcati
recreated the bombed façade of a Berlin train station that was still standing in the city’s
West sector, offering a way to view the ruins of the past as monuments of the present.
The second site-specific production that dealt with the Nazi past was a 1977 collaboration
between Peter Stein and Karl-Ernst Herrmann, of Shakespeare’s As You Like It in a
former Nazi poison gas manufacturing facility on the edge of West Berlin. The structure
had been used as a film studio in the first postwar decades and was unused since 1970. In
this production, Stein and Herrmann created a labyrinth, based in part on an installation
278
by the artist Paul Thek, through which visitors were invited to wander during the
performance. “Winterreise” and As You Like It traded the awe and docility of fascist
spectators for an emancipated condition of viewership.
The third type of site-specific production in this study occurred in former sites of
industrial labor—which, to some extent, the film studio was as well. In fall 1977, the
director Peter Zadek and designer Peter Pabst staged Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an
abandoned license-plate factory in Bochum, defamiliarizing the routines of attending
theater by bringing their audience to a location that lacked the comforts of a theater
house. Zadek pinned up reproductions of “inspiration” images around the factory for his
actors to emulate, ranging from comic book frames to contemporary works by
contemporary artists. Lastly, director Frank-Patrick Steckel (b. 1943), who trained in art
history, staged a Weimar-era adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III in a condemned
slaughterhouse in Bremen in 1978, bringing forth transhistorical themes of power and
violence as his audience followed the action through the dilapidated, blood-stained
building, surrounded by conveyor belts and rusted saws.
As with Zadek’s choice of factory in Bochum and Stein’s of a former gas factory
and film studio, the Bremen slaughterhouse was no longer a place of labor but, lacking
stages, curtains, concessions, and box office, it was explicitly not a theater, either. These
site-specific performances translated the moral decision-making of epic theater into
physical demands placed on spectators. Theater historian Wilhelm Hortmann describes
how in German theater of the 1960s and 1970s, “The easiest way to establish audience
contact was by moving out of the theater altogether to perform in deserted factories, film
279
studios, cinemas, or even the Olympic stadium.”
604
Additionally, the marriage of epic
theater and contemporary gallery installations reinforced this embodied experience of
theater. Some audiences leaned back to enjoy the productions while others were
instructed to ambulate, get dirty, stand for long periods, and participate in the drama. In
all of these scenarios, the pilgrimage to new or historically compromised sites constituted
a return to the epic theater’s ideal of a mentally alert and socially engaged viewer.
There was much pushback in theater criticism of the 1960s and 1970s against the
Guckkastenbühne, a term that refers variously to a peep show, cabinet of curiosities,
diorama, and magic lantern. The Guckkasten [looking box] refers to a scenario in which
one observes a given phenomenon through a rectangular frame, at a physical remove
from the actual action. In the postwar period, when “immersive” and “participatory” were
crucial terms for theater, critics and directors dismissed the Guckkasten as an outmoded
and passive model of viewership. Zadek, Stein, Heyme, Peymann, and the others
associated with Director’s Theater, received praise for transcending the Guckkastenbühne
and making the viewing of theater into a reciprocal act. Moving outside the peepshow
“box” of the theater house was a direct way of refuting this historical notion of
spectating.
605

Before returning to their productions in more detail, I want to contextualize the
exhibitions and installation works the directors referenced in their productions. Against

604
Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The twentieth century,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 282-3.
605
See Karl von Appen, “Guckkasten oder Arenabühne?” Theater der Zeit 6 (Jan 1975):
37-41; and Eric Hadley Denton, “The Technological Eye: Theater Lighting and
Guckkasten in Michaelis and Goethe,” in Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture,
ed. Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
2007), 239-64.
280
this backdrop of the gallery and art history, we can understand their defamiliarizations of
theatrical experience and the way they used art-installation strategies to engage with
German history. As in the previous chapters, the directors and designers examined here
were closely associated with Director’s Theater. They were not fringe or independent
practitioners; they were, rather, salaried employees of the biggest, most well funded
theaters in West Germany. Had they been smaller independent troupes, their move to
abandoned sites would not have been alarming. There was concurrently a robust culture
of street theater throughout both Germanys that made use of such alternative sites on a
regular basis. For these established figures in the federally funded context of West
Germany, choosing to work outside of a major theater house made an anti-institutional,
anti-bourgeois statement.
When the directors and designers attended large-scale international art
exhibitions, such as documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale, they noticed
installation-art strategies that recontextualized the art institution in which they occurred.
“White cube” galleries and neo-classical exhibition halls alike gave way to chaotic and
intensely personal experiences. Returning to their respective theaters, these directors and
designers worked with their production teams to “install” items on their stages in a way
that affected the same defamiliarization of the theater house. Site-specific productions are
an extreme case of this defamiliarization because they made use of very few recognizable
institutional mechanisms. They asked attendees to move through the space and follow
directions, as in the performative works and Happenings they attended at exhibitions of
contemporary art. Their Brechtian notion of theater as a political tool made this embodied
experience of galleries into a socially didactic scenario when translated to theater spaces.
281
I will argue that the theater case studies to which we will return later in the
chapter translated the look of particular art installations into an aesthetic phenomenon
that was more dematerialized, political, and participatory than the gallery spaces to which
they referred. This transitory aesthetic “performed” on stage in a way it could not in
galleries. It may be worth going back to Kaprow’s 1961 essay, “Happenings in the New
York Scene,” in which he argued, “the final point I should like to make about
Happenings as against plays is implicit in all the discussion—their impermanence… The
physical materials used to create the environment of Happenings are the most perishable
kind: newspapers, junk, rags, old wooden crates knocked together, cardboard cartons cut
up, real trees, foods, borrowed machines, etc. They cannot last for long in whatever
arrangement they are put.”
606
Curators and artists showing at documenta in 1972 and
1977 tried to avoid the art market’s exploitation by exhibiting performances, multiples,
and ephemeral objects that were nonetheless quickly canonized, collected, and sold.
Scenic works for stages, by contrast, were never for sale in the first place. Speculative
markets for art and relations with collectors who had questionable political or commercial
practices had no bearing on scenic artwork’s long-term existence. There were no curators
or registrars worrying about the storage, conservation, and survival of scenic works. As I
described in the introduction, scenic artworks were ephemeral and iterative creations,
rarely existing for more then five to ten years. They were discarded and remade for future
revivals, thus demonstrating a potential to survive material and market conditions, which
the installation art on which they were premised rarely possessed.

606
Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene” [1961] in Essays on the
Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1993)20.
282
Stein’s Peer Gynt and As You Like It productions and Zadek’s Hamlet toured or
were revived years after their premieres, and on those occasions, the sets were rebuilt.
The re-makes approximated the originals as closely as possible, but visual deviations
from the originals were not criticized and did not need to be excused, as for example,
exhibition copied of artworks are in their museum labels. Theater necessarily embraces
this material flexibility in a way that modern art long resisted because theater is an art of
constant repetitions, of scripts repeated ad infinitum, each time slightly different than the
last, none—or all—truly “original.” In the same years as the producers of Director’s
Theater were absorbing the contemporary installation art that they re-interpreted for
performances in the 1970s, the curator Jan Leering at the Van Abbemuseum in
Eindhoven was re-creating installations of the interwar period by artists such as El
Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, and László Moholy-Nagy. Art historian Claire Bishop
remarks upon the postwar wave of historical re-makes, “it was not until the 1976 Venice
Biennial [organized by Germano Celant], however, that Installation art was historicized
and explicitly linked to the historical Avant-garde.”
607
Theater professionals—some of
whom had backgrounds in art—saw installations by Allan Kaprow and Jannis Kounellis
next to those of Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitzky. Celant’s recreation of Ivan Puni’s 1921
exhibition at Galerie Der Sturm, for example, shows how the Soviet avant-garde artist’s
immersive “skied” hang against a graphic backdrop was once more a vital strategy in the
postwar period for other artists in the exhibition such as Daniel Buren (fig. 1 and 2).
608
It

607
Claire Bishop, “Reconstruction Era: The Anachronic Time(s) of Installation Art,” in
When Attitudes Become Form, Bern 1969/Venice 2013, ed. Germano Celant (Milan:
Fondazione Prada, 2013), 430.
608
Ivan Puni was the organizer of the career-making exhibition “Zero-Ten” (The Last
Futuristic Exhibition of Paintings “0,10”) in St. Petersburg in 1915. See Annja Müller-
283
was at this moment that the theater professionals in attendance began to see themselves as
re-creators, not only of interwar epic theater productions, but of the exhibition space of
contemporary art as well.
There was something about the way in which theater professionals experienced
installation art’s transformation of the gallery that they felt they were unable to do with
the tools available in the theater, something they needed to borrow from contemporary art
and exhibition design. One cannot say that Paul Thek and Edward Kienholz were
themselves “Brechtian,” since they did not engage with theories of epic theater, but their
quotation on German stages certainly was Brechtian. The 1970s stage montages between
contemporary art and dramaturgical defamiliarization to which that these visual traits of
installation art contributed point back to the foundation of epic theater itself, as laid by
Piscator and Heartfield in 1920.
Directors and designers responsible for the case studies in this chapter did not
refer to specific works, but rather the “look” of a certain exhibition or artist. The rhetoric
they used was similar to the theater critics quoted in the second chapter, who demonstrate
little familiarity with individual Pop artists but nonetheless had a general and abstracted
sense of “Pop art” as it appeared in galleries and was reproduced through installation
views in Das Kunstwerk and Der Spiegel. The stage set for Peymann and Freyer’s 1977
Faust, for example, was based on an installation he and Peymann had seen at the Venice
Biennale. The specific work, pavilion, or artist they were appropriating was not
noteworthy to them. Rather, exhibition spaces functioned for them as Gesamtkunstwerke
(total works of art). This is, in part, a function of the changing nature of exhibitions in

Alsbach, Andres Pardey, and Heinz Stahlhut, eds. 0.10 Ivan Puni and Photographs of the
Russian Revolution (Bern: Benteli Verlag and Basel: Museum Jean Tinguely, 2003).
284
Western Europe, beginning in the mid-1960s, the way they were documented, and the
reproduction and circulation of that documentation.
Art historians have defined the “blockbuster” exhibition as one that engages a
wide audience on topics of popular interest and draws upwards of a quarter million
viewers.
609
In this chapter the blockbuster exhibition refers to international art fairs, such
as the Venice Biennale, and to exhibitions that generated a high volume of press coverage
in both specialist and non-specialist publications, such as documenta. In the German-
speaking realm in the 1970s, no figure was more emblematic of this phenomenon than
the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933-2005). Szeemann initiated some of the most
significant turns in the course of postwar European art and exhibition practice, including
the role of the artist-as-curator and the itinerant-freelance “exhibition maker,” as he
called it. His exhibition “Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form: Works –
Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information,” at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969, was
the first survey of Conceptual art, including works by Hanne Darboven, Richard Serra,
Walter De Maria, Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Daniel Buren, and Mario Merz. The

609
Richard Speer dated the blockbuster exhibition’s inception to the 1972 exhibition,
“The Treasures of Tutankhamun,” at the British Museum in London, while Amy Von
Lintel has traced its origins to the large-scale exhibitions of 1850s England. Emma
Barker identifies the figure 250,000 as a minimum requirement of the label
“blockbuster.” See Richard E. Speer, “Art History and the ‘Blockbuster Exhibition,” The
Art Bulletin 68.3 (September 1986): 358-59; Amy M. Von Lintel, “Art History as
Spectacle: Blockbuster Exhibitions in 1850s England,” in Exhibiting Outside the
Academy, Salon, and Biennial, 1775-1999: Alternative Venues for Display, ed. Andrew
Graciano (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 131-68; and Emma
Barker, “Exhibiting the Canon: The Blockbuster Show,” in Contemporary Cultures of
Display, ed. Emma Barker (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association
with The Open University, 1999), 127.
285
artists were given funds to travel to Bern to install their own pieces, which many of them
did, working both individually and collaboratively in the galleries (fig. 3).
610

A fact remains absent or buried in almost every account of Szeemann’s life is
that his career began as cabaret actor and theater set designer.
611
Around 1957, Szeemann
transitioned from making theater to making exhibitions, remarking, “It gives you the
same rhythm as in theater, only you don’t have to be on stage constantly.”
612
Szeemann’s
treatment of artworks and exhibitions as theatrical, staged, recurrent phenomena is key to
understanding the display and installation strategies of his exhibitions, which functioned
more like iterative events than terminal formulations. Perhaps owing to the constant
changes that occurred throughout the run of Szeemann’s most high profile exhibitions,
his are some of the first exhibitions where “installation views” became as important as
photographs of individual, isolated works.
613
Documentation of works in relation to one
another took on a role of unprecedented importance, as artists reworked their own and
each other’s pieces in exhibitions such as “When Attitudes Become Form.” Site-specific
theater productions in the late 1970s were based on the ideas and overall appearances of
art installations more than on their component parts. The theatrical readings and mis-
readings of the contemporary art exhibition circa 1972 helps us to locate the shift from

610
See Harald Szeemann, Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form: Works –
Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information (Bern: Kunsthalle, and London: ICA,
1969); and Hans-Joachim Müller, Harald Szeemann: Exhibition Maker (Ostfildern: Hatje
Cantz Verlag, 2006).
611
See Glenn Phillips and Marcia Reed’s account of “albums that recorded theater pieces
and presentations from [Szeemann’s] teen years” in “Preserving the Legacy of Harald
Szeemann,” The Getty Iris (8 Jun 2011), online.
612
Hans Ulrich Obrist asks Szeemann about his theater work in “Mind over Matter,”
Artforum International 35.3 (Nov 1996): 74-9, 111-12, 119, 125.
613
Barker, Contemporary Cultures of Display (1999), 13-14, 27-30.
286
artworks toward exhibitions, which was perhaps more pronounced in theater production
and criticism than in galleries themselves.
Szeemann’s 1972 organization of documenta V in Kassel was among the most
pivotal of postwar Western European art exhibitions, particularly the “Individual
Mythologies” section, with large-scale installations by Joseph Beuys, Edward Kienholz,
and Paul Thek, among three dozen artists in that section alone.
614
Presenting
performance, installation art, video, and a host of process-based work, the exhibition
proposed that the museum could be a place for artists to express subjective worldviews
and unconventional display strategies. These artists became “auteur” arrangers of their
respective galleries, redirecting the narrative of the overall exhibition experience. The art
historian Ronald Nachtigäller even referred to Szeemann as documenta V’s “stage
director.”
615
The two artists in this exhibition that theater directors and designers quoted
on stage were Edward Kienholz and Paul Thek. Szeemann displayed Kienholz’s Five Car
Stud in a black air dome directly outside the museum, in which five cars encircle a parked
truck (fig. 4 and 5). Delta blues issuing from the truck’s radio transport viewers to the
American south at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Five white males have
apprehended an African-American man, dragged him from his truck, and are in the
process of castrating him. This disturbing “tableau” (Kienholz’s preferred term) was not

614
See Harald Szeemann, Arnold Bode, Hans Heinz Holz, et al. documenta 5 (Munich:
C. Bertelmann Verlag, 1972). See also “List of Sections, Co-Curators, and Artists – Plans
of the Exhibition,” in Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, ed. Florence Derieux
(Grenoble: Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble and Zurich:
JRP Ringer, 2007), 106-18.
615
Roland Nachtigäller, “Aufführung des Zeitgeists/Performing the Zeitgeist,” in
Michael Glasmeier and Barbara Heinrich, 50 Jahre documenta 1955-2005, Band 1:
Diskrete Energien/50 Years documenta 1955-2005, Vol. I: Discrete Energies (Göttingen:
Steidl, 2005), 30.
287
shown in the United States but, between 1972 and 1973, traveled to Kassel, Berlin, and
Düsseldorf.
Given that timeline, the Kienholz imagery that inspired the 1971 Peer Gynt
production was more likely that of Roxy’s (1961-1962), Kienholz’s contribution to
documenta IV in 1968. Roxy’s approximates the interior of a Las Vegas brothel, with dim
lighting, a jukebox, and alarmingly disfigured mannequins that stand in for live
prostitutes (fig. 6). Among these partial figures, a woman’s bust perches on a desk with
what appears to be blood dripping down its face, other plastic and plaster bodies are
spread eagle, one splayed atop a table base, and a more masculine figure bears a dinosaur
skull in place of a head (fig. 7). Kienholz painted the figures rapidly, leaving clumps of
paint and yellow varnish. At documenta one was permitted to enter the installation and sit
among the figures so that instead of peeping into the scene as a voyeur, one became a
customer participating in the nightmarish scene. The macabre appearance of the human
form in Kienholz’s work was what Stein’s Peer Gynt most obviously adapted, with actors
wearing masks, animal tails, and the “green-clad” seductress (die Grüne) revealing an
enormous bush of anal hair. 1968 was also the year that Wolf Vostell sent his electronic
dé-collage happening room to the Venice Biennale. Over a bed of shattered glass, he
installed military tents, television sets encrusted with commodities such as Coke bottles,
and computer-operated projections of horrific violence, largely of the Vietnam War (fig.
8). The accompanying publication, Elektronisher Happening Raum, includes an essay in
which Friedrich Wolfram Heubach frames Vostell’s installation in terms of concurrent
288
assemblages and performance pieces using televisions by Beuys and Kienholz.
616

Kienholz and his collaborator and wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, moved to West Berlin
in 1973, and Kienholz’s explicitly political work quickly became a touchstone for the
German history and display of installation art, or “Environment Kunst.”
617

Not far from Roxy’s at the “Pop documenta,” curator Arnold Bode installed
George Segal’s Woman Washing her Feet in a Sink (1964-1965) and one of two figures
from his sculpture, The Restaurant Window (1967; fig. 9).
618
Like Kienholz, Segal cast
his figures from live models using plaster, resulting in sculptures with lifelike gestures
but explicitly sculptural, non-human surfaces. Bode placed the two separate sculptures in
a theatrical scenario that visitors investigated at close range. Some even placed
themselves within the scene by joining the seated figure on her bench, for example. Like
Kienholz, Segal was one of the references to contemporary art that theater critics used to
characterize the As You Like It production.
The program booklet published on the occasion of As You Like It featured texts
and images that inspired the production. Among the historical photographs, the booklet
includes early American pioneers, a bourgeois nineteenth century picnic scene, redwood
trees and tree houses, a Tahitian landscape by Paul Gauguin, and a detailed plant study by
the photographer Karl Blossfeldt. Many of these images were closely replicated in the set

616
Peter Saage, ed., Wolf Vostell: elektronischer Dé-coll/age Happening Raum 1959-
1968/Technologie (Frankfurt/M: Typos Verlag, 1969), GRI Special Collections 41-360.
See also Kienholz Televisions (Venice: CA: L.A. Louver Gallery, 2016.
617
See Willy Rotzler, Objekt-Kunst von Duchamp bis Kienholz (Cologne: DuMont
Schauberg, 1972); Jörn Merkert, Edward Kienholz: Volksemfängers (West Berlin:
Nationalgalerie, 1977); and Werner Haftmann et al., Metamorphose des Dinges: Kunst
und Antikunst 1910-1970 (Brussels: la Connaissance, 1971).
618
Stephen Bann, “Documenta 4,” London Magazine (1 Sept 1968): 98-101. Despite
giving incorrect names for the works by Kienholz and Oldenburg, Bann offers a helpful
overview of his experience as a visitor to the exhibition.
289
design. Of particular interest is a full-page reproduction of Thek’s Arc, Pyramid taken at
documenta V in 1972 (fig. 10).
619
Thek’s works involve webs of religious and personal
meanings related to specific symbols that recur throughout his oeuvre, ranging from
hunks of wax made to look like flesh, to sculptural postmortem self-portraits, pyramids,
and ziggurats. The dense installation at documenta contained a wood-framed pyramid
covered in newspaper, a field of sand raked into waves over the floor, a wooden boat
containing plant life, a taxidermic bunny and swan, and the artist’s self-portrait as a
corpse in a shipping crate. Thek lit the darkened gallery with candles and had soft music
playing in the background.
Stein and Herrmann quoted this installation for their labyrinth in the poison gas
factory-turned-film studio, bringing in plants and trees, wooden catwalks, and running
water (fig. 11). In the play, Herrmann’s labyrinth symbolized the journey that outcasts
from the royal court undertake from society to nature. The audience followed the actors
for about fifteen minutes through a surrealist maze of wildlife, taxidermic animals,
skeletons, and dummies. Although Thek’s installation served primarily as visual
inspiration for As You Like It, his aesthetic developed out of his outsider status as a gay,
Catholic artist in a heterosexual-male dominated art world. His Arc, Pyramid thus
manifested a personal significance that was similar to the role of Herrmann’s installation
within Shakespeare’s plot. Thek described his environment, as “the place of concentrated
energy, a birth-canal, the way of the Cross. [The corridor] is also used in the sense, which

619
Northrop Frye, Jan Kott, and Agnes Latham (Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer), Texte
und Bilder zu ‘Wie es euch gefällt’ von William Shakespeare (Berlin: Albert Hentrich,
1977) in ADK Schaubühne Archive folder 421.
290
[Carl] Jung mentioned, of a journey of initiation (a rite of passage).”
620
Some theater
critics mentioned Thek’s name, which was printed in the booklet, but references to his
work took the form of abstract allusions to a “documenta” aesthetic.
A critic from Der Spiegel pointed out that Herrmann’s maze was “a mix of
documenta, ghost train, zoo, and jogging path.”
621
Another commented, “there is no stage
design to speak of but rather a total environment, which the audience moves through as
extras, which they admire as a work of art that would be as likely at documenta as
here.”
622
Others wrote, “from scene to scene, environments are developed that would fit
right in at documenta,” and described coming across “two or three sculptural figures à la
Kienholz or [George] Segal” in the labyrinth.”
623
The term “à la,” in the style of, captures
the ambiguity of the theatrical misprisions of installation art. Herrmann availed himself

620
Harald Szeemann, “Interview with Paul Thek,” Duisburg, 12 Dec 1973, trans. Gloria
and Isaac Custance in Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist, ed. Harald Falckenberg and Peter
Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2008), 383.
621
“…Mischung aus Documenta, Geisterbahn, Zoo und Trimm-dich-Pfad.” Hellmuth
Karasek, “Weltflucht mit Shakespeare,” Der Spiegel (26 Sept 1977): 229 in ADK
Schaubühne Archive folder 429.
622
“Das Bühnenbild ist längst keines mehr, es ist totales Environment, in dem die
Zuschauer sich wie Statisten bewegen, das sie bestaunen können wie ein Kunstwerk, das
denn auch eher an der Documenta zu suchen wäre als hier.” Reinhardt Stumm, “Stein und
Zadek—zwei Shakespeare-Auffassungen: Wie es euch gefällt in Berlin und Hamlet in
Bochum,” Tages Anzeiger, Zürich (14 Oct 1977) in ADK Schaubühne Archive folder
429. Stumm claims that “Karl-Ernst Herrmann in fact exhibited at the most recent
documenta” (“Karl-Ernst Herrmann hat ja tatsächlich an der letzten Documenta
ausgestellt.”) but according to the documenta Archive, Karl-Ernst Herrmann was not part
of any official documenta exhibition, either the fifth in 1972 or the sixth in 1977. It is
possible that Stumm was referring to an unofficial theater event in Kassel around the
same time as documenta, which closed in October 1977.
623
“Szene auf Szene entwickelt sich aus einem Environment, das der documenta alle
Ehre machen würde.” Heinz Klunker, “Verzauberungen und Verstörungen im
unheimlichen Ardenner Wald,” Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt 40 (2 Oct 1977):
16; and “…rechts zwei, drei plastischen Figuren à la Kienholz oder Segal.” Peter Meier,
“Märchenhaft schön und leicht ironisch: Peter Steins Wie es euch gefällt-Inszenierung in
der Züspa-Halle-2,” Tages Anzeiger, Zürich, (3 Jul 1978), both in ADK Schaubühne
Archive folder 429.
291
of similar materials and symbols as Kienholz, Segal, and Thek, but applied them to the
narrative development of a durational, ticketed experience quite distinct from the equally
ritualistic but less temporally defined experience of visiting the Fridericianum, where
documenta took place. Despite references to Kienholz, Segal, Thek, and Beuys, most
critics invoked “documenta” as a shorthand for contemporary art and installation
practices at large. Owing to the wide circulation of installation views from documenta in
newspapers and magazines, the critics who mentioned Thek, Kienholz, and Oldenburg’s
works, may not even have seen them in person. For these critics documenta was not a
collection of individual artworks but a venue that pushed the boundaries of artistic media,
addressed topics such as racial violence and consumerism, and blurred the distinctions
between spectator and performer.
Two years after As You Like It premiered, Herrmann was featured in the
exhibition “Staged Spaces” at the Kunstverein in Hamburg.
624
A critic from the
newspaper Die Zeit related Herrmann’s designs to Thek’s Arc, Pyramid and Szeemann’s
“Individual Mythologies” section at documenta V.
625
While the art-historical literature on
Szeemann and Thek does not connect their installations at documenta to their stage work,
Thek and Szeemann in fact met at the theater, and Herrmann’s theatrical appropriation of
Thek’s installation is less arbitrary than it may seem. Thek acted as an extra in Robert
Wilson’s stage production of Deafman Glance in Paris in 1971, which Szeemann

624
The exhibition catalogue was published as Inszenierte Räume: Karl-Ernst Herrmann,
Erich Wonder (Hamburg: Kunstverein Hamburg, 1979).
625
See Petra Kipphoff, “Stücke ohne Text: Zur Ausstellung Inszenierte Räume,” Die Zeit
(20 April 1979).
292
attended.
626
Szeemann and Thek were seated near each other at one point in the twenty-
four hour production and discussed their mutual admiration for Wilson’s poetics of the
stage.
627
In a 1973 interview with Szeemann, Thek recounted, “I was always incredibly
scared of any kind of stage. I had nightmares about suddenly being pushed out on stage
and not knowing what I should say, but when I saw the production by Wilson I
immediately wanted to be part of it.”
628
Thek began acting as an extra in Wilson’s Paris
production and contributed his own set designs for its New York presentation. Thek
overcame his stage fright shortly before arranging his documenta installation, the
principal visual reference for As You Like It. Without meaning to Herrmann located the
scenic impulse in Thek’s work, just as Thek was discovering it himself.
Achim Freyer, the co-director and designer of Faust in Stuttgart, also had direct
connections to contemporary installation strategies at documenta. In addition to his
training as a painter, Freyer studied under Brecht and is often mentioned alongside Minks
and Herrmann as a key figure in developing the aesthetic of Director’s Theater. By the
mid-1970s, Freyer was established both as a gallery artist and a designer and director of
opera and theater. In 1977, he was invited to contribute a work to documenta VI, which
was heavily influenced by his interest in Joseph Beuys and his concurrent work on
Faust.
629
Freyer’s installation, Deutschland, ein Lebensraum (literally “Germany, a
Living Space”) invited viewers, five at a time, to climb into a small room and explore

626
Susanne Neubauer, Paul Thek in Process. Commentaries in/of an Exhibition (Berlin:
Revolver, 2014).
627
Harald Szeemann, “Interview with Paul Thek,” in Paul Thek (2008), 390.
628
Ibid.
629
Richard Riddell discusses Freyer’s debt to Beuys in “The German Raum,” The Drama
Review 24.1 (Mar 1980): 48-52.
293
(fig. 12).
630
The work reflected on the difficulty of reflecting critically on German history
and featured a scarecrow in safari gear with fur gloves, peering out of a window into a
bright light. The lone figure with his back turned to the viewer, contemplating the world
through a window, resembles the Rückenfiguren of Caspar David Friedrich and Adolph
von Menzel, but it also appropriates Joseph Beuys’ iconic dress.
631
As rabbits scurried
about in the no-mans-land between the two Berlin walls, they became a symbol of
divided Germany and, in relation to Beuys’ dead hare, signified the regeneration of
Germany. Elements that made the comparison to As You Like It particularly obvious to
theater critics who were familiar with Freyer’s installation were a hole in the floor filled
with lily pads, a human dummy wearing a gas mask, running water, and a fir tree.
632
One
critic responded to Herrmann’s Thek-inspired labyrinth, writing, “Karl-Ernst Herrmann
apparently wants to emulate his colleague Achim Freyer and could very well design his
own room at documenta.”
633
In addition to Freyer’s participation in documenta after
already becoming an established stage designer, Szeemann’s past as a stage artist and
Thek’s foray into the medium of theater are important references, too, for these
experiences informed their conceptions of the gallery as an arena in which to act. The
demands placed on visitors to the 1972 and 1977 documenta, to walk, crawl, stand on tip

630
Lebensraum was Hitler’s term for the land needed for an expanding Aryan race.
631
The lone figure contemplating the world through a window is a historically loaded
trope in German visual culture. See Lutz Koepnick, Framing Attention: Windows on
Modern German Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Sabine
Rewald, Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the Nineteenth Century (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
632
ADK – Achim Freyer Archive, box 499.
633
“Karl-Ernst Herrmann will es offenbar seinem Kollegen Achim Freyer nachtun und
ebenfalls bei der documenta einen Raum gestalten dürfen.” Christoph Müller, “Im
Irrgarten: Ein Glaubenskrieg um die Schaubühne: Steins Shakespeare-Show,” Südwest-
Presse, Ulm (18 Oct 1977) in ADK Schaubühne Archive folder 429.
294
toe, and get dirty, were major departures from the static viewing positions encouraged by
the exhibition’s previous installments.
Edward Kienholz, Paul Thek, George Segal, Achim Freyer—their “assemblages,”
“installations,” and “tableaux” exhibited in Germany were arrangements of human forms
and quotidian objects. Although such installations functioned differently in galleries than
on theater stages, it should not be surprising that theater professionals who visited these
galleries saw their own methods of defamiliarizing social situations reflected in such
immersive and figurative works. In one review of Freyer and Peymann’s Faust titled,
“The Entire Faust Freed from Cliché,” a critic claimed that the production felt like a
“Happening,” and another wrote, “the environments… recall the dream-landscapes of
‘Private Mythologies’ seen at documenta some years ago,” referring to the “Individual
Mythologies” section that included works by Beuys, Kienholz, Thek, and others.
634

During a public discussion in advance of the Faust premier, Peymann explained
that he and Freyer saw an installation “at the last Venice Biennale and we wanted to
make something similar.”
635
This was the 1976 Biennale mentioned earlier, for which
Germano Celant organized “Ambiente/Arte” in the central Italian Pavilion, pairing
historical and contemporary installations by artists (see fig. 2). Additionally, Szeemann

634
“Anflug von Happening: Was diesem ‘Faust II’ mit Happening-touch auf seiner
weiteren Reise begegnet, ist vor allem dank Achim Freyers nun von aller Enge befreiten
Ausstattung eine Suite von grotesken , zirzensischen, kulinarischen Überraschungen...: in
Susanne Ulricht, “Der ganze Faust vom Klischee befreit,” Augsburger Allgemeine (3 Mar
1977); and “Eine Reise nach Stuttgart wert sind alleischon die Environments, die Achim
Freyer als Szenenbilder gebaut hat. Sie erinnern an Traumlandschaftern der
‘Privatmythologien,’ die man sie vor einige Jahren auf der 'documenta' gesehen hat” in
Rolf Michaelis, “Faschingstreiben bei Dr. Faust... Oder das Mysterienspiel als
Volkstheater,” Die Zeit (4 Mar 1977), both in ADK Achim Freyer Archiv, box 475.
635
“Gespräch über Faust I und II / 25 April 1977,” Bestand: EL 221/9, Bestellnummer:
D036003/102 in Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart of the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.
295
installed his traveling exhibition, “Bachelor Machines,” Earthworks were on view,
Joseph Beuys arranged his totemic Tram Stop in the German Pavilion, and Dan Graham
created a situation where audiences become performers in his work, Public Space/Two
Audiences.
636
Peymann and Freyer saw these installations and even conducted a Faust
production meeting while in Venice. Such works by contemporary artists shared visual
strategies with the stage concept Freyer and Peymann developed for Faust, but, as
mentioned earlier, the co-directors never pinpointed a specific installation or artist from
the Biennale. The 1976 Biennale was an installation of installations, in which
architectural spaces and effects overwhelmed individual artworks. It was precisely the
cumulative spaces and effects of such exhibitions—and their reproduction as installation
views in the press—that Stein, Freyer, Peymann, Grüber, Zadek, Steckel, and their teams
of designers appropriated for productions throughout the 1970s.

Salvaged Art and Architecture

Whereas scenic design alludes to a site by way of props or a schematic backdrop,
the setting for site-specific theater is whole, not suggestive, and offers a place itself, not
an artistic allusion to a place. Much of a given site’s impact was revealed before actors
and audiences stepped foot into a structure: spending an hour or more on the bus, getting
lost in a dimly lit slum, tripping over a pothole in the parking lot, staining one’s pants on
dirty bleachers, and getting stopped at a checkpoint. There is a richness of theater

636
Anne Ring Petersen, Installation Art Between Image and Stage (Copenhagen:
Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015), 174.
296
scholarship on site-specific performance and the way place informs meaning.
637
At
length, art historians have also explored how, in the 1960s and 1970s, “artists turned their
attention to site” and “confronted growing forms of dislocation.”
638
Visual artists and
curators have been pressed to think about what it means to document land art and to

637
Key theater studies are: Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance Place and
Documentation (London: Routledge, 2000); Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks,
Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001); Fiona Wilkie, “Mapping the Terrain: A
Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain,” New Theatre Quarterly 18.2 (2002):
140-60; Bradford D. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Performance in
Sixties America (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Jen
Harvie, Staging the UK (Manchester: Manchester University Pres, 2005); Mike Pearson,
In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
2006) and Site-Specific Performance (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmilan,
2010); Rebecca Schneider, Performance Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical
Reenactment (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011); Anna Birch and Joanne
Tompkins, eds., Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice (Hampshire,
UK and New York: Palgrave Macmilan, 2012); Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres:
Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Hampshire, UK and New York:
Palgrave Macmilan, 2013); Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics
of the Invitation (Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmilan, 2013); Joanne
Tompkins, Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space
(Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmilan, 2014).
638
These words from Jane McFadden in “Toward Site,” Grey Room 27 (Spring, 2007):
37. Other notable discussions of site-specific art from this period include Rosalind
Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30-44; Craig
Owens, “Earthworks,” October 18 (Fall 1979): 120-30; Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational
Aesthetics [1998] (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2002); Dolores Hayden, The Power of
Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); James
Meyer, “The Functional Site,” Documents 7 (Fall 1996): 20-29 and “Nomads,” Parkett
35 (May 1997): 205-14; Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in
a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997); Erika Suderberg, ed., Space,
Site, Intervention: Situation Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000); Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Ken Ehrlich, Brandon Labelle, and Stephen Vitiello, ed.,
Surface Tension: Problematics of Site (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2003); Claire
Doherty, Contemporary Art: from Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog, 2004); Jenny
Molissa Spring, ed., Unexpected Art: Serendipitous Installations, Site-Specific Works,
and Surprising Interventions (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2014). Although the
present discussion uses “site specific,” other studies may use related terms, such as site-
determined, site-oriented, site-referenced, site-conscious, site-responsive, and site-related.
297
relocate a site-specific work from nature or the street to a gallery, and from one
institution to another, when the work is developed expressly for a given site.
639
These are
less problematized procedures within theater production, as even the site-specific
productions from this chapter toured to circuses, exposition centers, and equestrian
schools in new cities.
In addition to charting the shift in exhibition history from the individual artwork
to the installation view, the productions in this chapter also offer an important historical
precedent for galleries’ relocations circa 1990 from neoclassical and modernist
architectural shells to post-industrial ones. Nikos Papastergiadis writes, “If we consider
the ways in which artists have not merely inhabited buildings that were abandoned by
commerce and citizens, but have staged their events in these parts of the city, we can also
gain a new perspective on the relationship between the available spaces in the
postindustrial urban landscape and the conception, production, and display of art.”
640

Cultural institutions’ appropriation of buildings dedicated to capitalist labor has a
much longer arc than the productions in this chapter can encapsulate. A noteworthy
episode from exhibition history, is the 1863 Salon des Refusés (exhibition of rejects), a
counter-exhibition to the selective Paris Salon, which opened in auxiliary rooms of the

639
Performance scholarship on documenting liveness includes Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’
in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56.4 (Winter
1997); and Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ:
A Journal of Performance and Art 28.3 (September 2006): 1-10.
640
Nikos Papastergiadis, “Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary,” in Terry
Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture:
Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2008), 371.
298
Palace of Industry (Palais de l’Industrie).
641
This venue was constructed to showcase
industrial novelties at the 1855 World’s Fair (Exposition Universelle), and was thus a
testament to, rather than an actual site of, the crushing labor on which capitalism was
built.
642
Within theater history the relevant precursor, detailed in the first chapter, is
Heartfield and Piscator carting their props to Berlin union halls and factories to perform
didactic theater pieces, sometimes with casts comprised entirely of laborers. The 1970s
productions in this chapter represent a turning point in West Germany’s history, as actual
labor began to vacate these sites. The booming industrial economy of the 1960s led to an
expanded and upwardly mobile middle class and the closing of plants in the 1970s and
1980s.
643
Looking outside Germany, the architecture installment of the Venice Biennale
expanded in 1980 from pavilions in the Giardini Pubblici to the Arsenale, a former
shipyard and the largest pre-industrial production center in early modern Europe.
644

Subsequent Biennale installations forged visual connections between contemporary
artistic practice and the aesthetics of brick walls and concrete floors, elements that would
gradually become neutralized and lose their dissonance.
The pace of cultural relocation and displacement accelerated as the millennium
approached, particularly as the East and West opened to each other in 1989. In 1990,
Rosalind Krauss wrote about the 1980s as “a decade of casino capitalism,” describing

641
Lelia Packer, “How the Impressionists Broke from the Salon,” in Art + Paris:
Impressionists and Post-impressionists: The Ultimate Guide to Artists, Paintings and
Places in Paris and Normandy (New York: Museyon, 2012), 93-96.
642
Javier Monclús, International Exhibitions and Urbanism: The Zaragoza Expo 2008
Project (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 27.
643
See James Lingwood, “The Weight of Time,” in Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla
Becher/Robert Smithson (Porto: Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, 2002), 70;
and Stefan Goch, “Betterment without Airs,” in De-industrialization (2002) 87-112.
644
Thomas Max Safley and Leonard N. Rosenband, The Workplace Before the Factory:
Artisans and Proletarians, 1500-1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 180.
299
museums as capital-producing centers and basing her observations largely on the
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) being built in a cavernous
former mill complex.
645
The Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin,
founded in the early 1990s, re-opened in 1999 in an old margarine factory in the former
East Berlin. The Tate Modern opened in the former Bankside Power Station in London in
2000, preserving the brick façade and smokestack as reminders of the building’s history
as a place of industrial production rather than aesthetic consumption. The Dia Art
Foundation opened the Dia:Beacon Riggio Galleries in a former Nabisco box printing
factory on the Hudson River in 2003, a setting that dialogues with the industrial materials
and methods used by the artists presented in the space. To give but one example of this
practice outside of Western Europe and North America, the Istanbul Museum of Modern
Art opened in 2004 in a former warehouse along the Bosphorus. Claire Bishop noted in
2013 that “the museum’s external wrapper has become more important than its contents,
just as Krauss foresaw in 1990, leaving art with the option of looking ever more lost
inside gigantic post-industrial hangars.”
646
This is the concern that theater critics had with
productions in empty factories as early as 1977.
Site-specific productions in ruined or historically problematic settings offer a
vocabulary for understanding the nonlinear and asynchronous histories that are created
when art inhabits historical spaces build for production rather than leisure and

645
Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54
(Fall 1990): 3-17.
646
Claire Bishop, Radical Museology or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of
Contemporary Art? (London: Koenig Books, 2013), 10.
300
consumption.
647
The scenarios these theater productions and their architectural shells
created were embryonic in Heartfield and Piscator’s work from the 1920s and have, since
the 1990s, become integral to museum architecture and curatorial practice. These spatial
dislocations went hand in hand with temporal ones. The productions in this chapter raise
the question of whether site specificity demands historical non-specificity, of whether the
time in which the site was constructed must be at odds with the later time of the
intervention.
648
The iterative format of theater, more than non-scripted artistic media,
permits returns to previous moments or ideologies. Theater allowed for returns in the late
1970s to earlier moments of capitalist labor, fascism, and socialist Weimar-era
dramaturgical theories.
Almost all the productions in this chapter premiered at the height of the Deutscher
Herbst (German Autumn), briefly described in the previous chapter, when RAF leaders
were found dead in their prison cells amid events that their network organized, including
assassination attempts, fires, and bombings. This was a time of tightening state control
and surveillance and the decline of the protest movement with which the decade began.
The director of the Stuttgart Faust, Claus Peymann, took a stance regarding these events
by using the theater as a platform to raise funds to assist RAF leaders with their dental
bills.
649
While Peymann’s effort was not a staged action, it was nonetheless highly

647
As discussed in the first chapter, my conceptualization of non-synchronicity in theater
and modernism comes from Ernst Bloch, “Summary Transition: Non-Contemporaneity
and Obligation to its Dialectic” [1932], Heritage of Our Times, trans., Neville and
Stephen Plaice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).
648
Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan distinguish spatial memory from visual memory in
Winter and Sivan, Eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17.
649
Caroline Sproll, RAF – Terror im Südwesten (Stuttgart: Haus der Geschichte Baden-
Württemberg, 2013), 106-9.
301
criticized by some and praised by others, and in any event, led audiences to understand
his productions as critical of the West German government’s handling of the terrorists
and legacies of National Socialism. The largely peaceful demonstrations of the 1960s
were replaced with gestures such as blowing up buildings and assassinating public
figures. Even when it had been proven that such figures had strong ties to the Nazi past,
the public was sharply divided on the ethics of these acts of terrorism.
The predicament of “activism”—its polarization into extreme violence or fear,
paralysis, and political defeatism—called into question theater’s ability to achieve any
kind of political activation with significance beyond a given production or theater house.
The use of sites where everything was unfamiliar engaged audiences in embodied
encounters between contemporary culture and a problematic history. Whereas Piscator’s
notion of audience activation had been more physical and was intended to translate
directly into political action upon exiting the theater, Brecht’s paradigm for activation
was more cerebral. One of Brecht’s best descriptions of “activated” spectators remains
the narrator’s instruction to the audience in his play, In the Jungle of Cities (Im Dickicht
der Städte; 1921-1924): “Don’t worry your heads about the motives of the fight,
concentrate on the stakes. Judge impartially the technique of the contenders, and keep
your eyes fixed on the finish.”
650
If audiences could absorb this Brechtian lesson in a
defamiliarized experience of theater, could they also apply that privileging of reason over

650
Before Brecht, Sergei Eisenstein had his actors train with professional wrestlers to
perform a match for his 1921 stage production of The Mexican. See James Goodwin,
Eisenstein, Cinema, and History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1993), 25. Brecht incorporated boxing and wrestling into his plays, conspicuously In the
Jungle of Cities and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. See Martin Walsh,
“The Complex Seer: Brecht and the Film,” Monthly Film Bulletin 43.4 (Fall 1974): 225;
Bertolt Brecht, In the Jungle of Cities [1927], Gerhard Nellhaus, Trans., in John Willett
and Ralph Manheim, Eds., Collected Plays, Vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1970), 118.
302
emotion to watching daily news broadcasts? This was the crucial question for West
German theater professionals in the late 1970s. Their responses brought together
Brechtian situations of moral ambiguity and Piscator-style scenarios of transformed site,
merging cognitive and physical notions of engagement.
By the late 1970s, site-specific theater had a decades-long history in Germany but
was not always a strategy or even a choice.
651
Piscator participated in a theater in ruins in
1929 while volunteering for a front-line performance group in World War I, recalling, “a
remarkable paradox: to see theatrical performance in cities demolished by shellfire.”
652

Soon after the War, Piscator’s Proletarian Theater traveled with Heartfield’s sets to
working-class neighborhoods in Berlin.
653
Their early site-specific productions in the first
half of the 1920s grew out of wartime experiences of theatrical sites as interchangeable,
impermanent, and in dialogue with politics and war.
In an uncanny echo of history, after the allied bombings at the end of World War
II, German theater again occupied sites “demolished by shellfire,” as historian Arno Paul
detailed: “Theatres were open even before the grossest ruins had been cleared away,
before the bomb craters had been filled… People gathered in cellars, classrooms, private
apartments, and town halls, most of them damaged and unheated.”
654
A 1943 image of
the bombed Volksbühne, one of the most popular theaters in both interwar and postwar
Berlin, shows piles of rubble, an enormous hole in the ceiling, and a nest of metal rods

651
This study concentrates on the twentieth century but one could also consider medieval
passion plays in town squares and itinerant minstrel plays as historical precursors.
652
Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre [1929/1963] (New York: Avon Books, 1978),
15.
653
Michael Patterson, The Revolution in German Theatre 1900-1933 (Boston, London,
and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 117.
654
Arno Paul, “The West German Theater Miracle: a Structural Analysis,” trans. Martha
Humphreys, The Drama Review 24.1 (1980): 4.
303
sticking out from an upper balcony (fig. 13).
655
Note that this photograph was taken two
years before the most devastating bombings.
656

As mentioned in the introduction, theater was one of the first vehicles through
which Germans collectively reconnected to culture, gathered for leisure activities, and
laughed after the Second World War. Only later, in the 1960s and 1970s, after the major
theater houses had been rebuilt, could site-specific performances be considered an
aesthetic choice rather than a necessity. Even after moving into newly rebuilt houses,
however, theaters continued to be sites for the collective negotiation of a traumatic past.
With the exception of the Berlin Schaubühne, which was in the process of renovating a
new house during the 1977 As You Like It production, this chapter looks at cases in which
a fully functioning theater was available and the company nevertheless selected an
alternative location.
Piscator, who directed theater in West Berlin from 1962 until 1966, suggested that
the modern architecture of newly rebuilt theaters in West Germany defanged attempts to
stage political theater: “After the war a great number of new theatres were built… Yet
behind glass and concrete, in the wonderful new buildings and on wide stages the theatre
seems to have gone back to its original elementary character: to play. Only now and then
does it penetrate further, into the spiritual realm, beyond a mere interpretation of a work,
to gain a far wider significance, to represent the spirit of a nation.”
657
Piscator

655
Erika Billeter, Ed., Das Bühnenbild nach 1945, eine Dokumentation (Zürich:
Buchdruckerei Berichthaus and Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich, 1964).
656
This is the theater that showed Heartfield’s photomontages of Marx and Lenin in 1966
for Lenin Poem, the subject of which was reconstruction and infrastructure, and for which
the program booklet included a graphic of a man swinging a hammer at an anvil.
657
Erwin Piscator, quoted in Erwin Piscator: Political Theatre, 1920-1966 (Berlin:
Akademie der Künste, 1971), 67.
304
nevertheless referred to these spaces as “wonderful,” and indeed worked until his death in
one of the “successful examples of postwar modernism in theater architecture,” rather
than moving to alternative locations, or joining Heartfield in East Berlin.
658
The
“wonder” Piscator invoked, perhaps cynically, suggests a barrier between the political
reality spectators faced in the world outside of theater, and the guarded, stylish interior of
houses that no amount of political or visual provocation on stage could penetrate.
Site-specific theater was not new in the 1970s, nor was the performance of theater
in ruins. Ancient Greek and Roman amphitheaters continued to be used for performances
and one could also recall iconic examples of site-specific theater from the first half of the
twentieth century such as Nikolai Evreinov’s historical re-staging, Storming of the Winter
Palace (1920) on the third anniversary of the actual event in Petrograd or Max
Reinhardt’s Faust I in the former Felsenreitschule (equestrian school) in Salzburg (1933-
1937; fig. 14 and 15). What makes German postwar theater in ruins historically
significant is the function of ruins in the German imaginary after three decades of
clearing away rubble and rebuilding. Actors, directors, set designers, and audiences in
Germany in the 1960s and 1970s were of a generation referred to in their youth as
Kellerkinder (“cellar urchins”), which the author James O’Donnell described poetically
as “those working-class boys and girls who, in the late war years, had made the ruins
their playground.”
659
In explaining how theater and politics came together in West
Germany, theater historian Johannes Birringer wrote that, “growing up in West Germany

658
“…gelungenes Beispiel der Nachkriegsmoderne in der Theatrarchitektur.” See Antje
Dietze, Ambivalenzen des Übergangs: Die Volksbühne am Rosa-Luzemburg-Platz in
Berlin in den neunziger Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 92. Aside
from this quote, the book focuses on a different theater with a similar name located in the
former East Berlin. Piscator’s theater was designed by architect Fritz Bornemann.
659
James P. O’Donnell, The Bunker [1975/1978], (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2001), 301.
305
after WWII, I learned to understand history through the guilty silence that followed the
horror of destruction. After the postwar period of economic reconstruction, school ended
when rebellion took to the streets in 1968. That was my first schooling in the situationist
theater of confrontation against the status quo.”
660

Like German theater, British postwar theater also turned in the direction of site-
specificity to examine loss and memory.
661
In both contexts, eighteenth-century
Romantics produced art and literature that looked to medieval ruins as sites of nostalgia
and contemplation. The German case was different, however, because ruins, which
became emblematic for Germany nationalists in the nineteenth century, were again
prominent features of cities and the countryside in the postwar period at a rate far greater
than in the United Kingdom.
662
Romanticism, as an artistic and literary style, was favored
and heavily co-opted by Nazi ideologues, making it difficult for postwar artists to
reconnect with texts by Hölderlin or paintings by Caspar David Friedrich.
The 1970s were marked in both Germanys by debates over whether to remake
historical buildings and simulate pre-war city layouts or depart from the past and embrace
modernist architecture and wide boulevards. Amid such discussions, ruins became
monuments in their own right, proof of Germany’s pre-Nazi past and also of the

660
Johannes Birringer, Media and Performance along the Border (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3.
661
The existing literature on site-specific performance is heavily oriented toward artists
and theater troupes in North America and the United Kingdom in part because publishers
based there, Routledge and Palgrave Macmilan, have shown unparalleled commitment to
this topic with nearly a dozen recent volumes cited throughout this chapter.
662
On the specificity of the German cult of ruins, see Robert R. Taylor, The Castles of the
Rhine: Recreating the Middle Ages in Modern Germany (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 1998), 53; Barbara Maria Stafford, “‘Illiterate Monuments’:
The Ruin as Dialect or Broken Classic,” in Erika Suderberg, Space, Site, Intervention
(2000), 64-83; and Andrew Cusack, The Wanderer in Nineteenth-Century German
Literature (Rochester, NY and Suffolk, UK: Camden House, 2008), 115.
306
destruction brought by a war that Germany initiated. Historian Lothar Kettenacker
suggests that such ruins within the landscape of the divided nation served as “silent
memorials left as a warning to future generations.”
663
By the mid-1970s public attention
turned to the ethical problems of reconstruction, of wishing away visual markers of a
difficult past. East Germany did not institute its General Monuments Preservation Law
until 1975 and West German states continued to administer decisions concerning the
destruction of ruins and the reconstruction of new buildings in their place on an
individual basis.
664
Germany’s landscape of ruination was thus unique among site-
specific performances in Western Europe. Robert Moscoso’s 1970 stage design for the
Théâtre du Soleil’s production of 1789, for instance, in a sports stadium in Milan,
required spectators to stand in the center of the arena with actors on raised platforms
around the periphery, but did not have to confront a difficult history of the site.
With the exception of the Olympiastadion, which had been refurbished since
World War II, West German directors, designers, and dramaturges searched for buildings
whose abandonment or neglect compounded damage from aerial bombings three decades
earlier. The productions in this chapter are also histories about the return of exiles to
Germany. Zadek, the Jewish director of Hamlet, was forced into exile during the Nazi
period and Jahnn, the gay, pacifist playwright of The Coronation of Richard III, was
exiled during both World Wars. As You Like It took place in the former Berlin film studio
of an exiled Polish Jew, Artur Brauner, who brought other film directors such as Fritz

663
Lothar Kettenacker, “The German Debate,” in Terror from the Sky: The Bombing of
German Cities in World War II, ed. Igor Primoratz (New York and Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2010), 211.
664
John H. Stubbs and Emily G. Makas, Architectural Conservation in Europe and the
Americas (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2011), 212-14.
307
Lang out of exile and back into the industry.
665
Such productions were possible only
because, even after being persecuted and interned, these cultural producers made the
difficult decision to return to Germany to work. Their productions in abandoned or war-
ravaged sites, like their own professional trajectories, show that the modernist project of
the Weimar period was still active, or had at least been renewed (erneuert) decades later.
The sites hey chose had specific functions predating the theatrical intervention:
slaughterhouse, poison gas factory turned film studio, and license plate factory; these
were spaces where particular kinds of labor took place. The rusty machinery used to
slaughter animals was visible during the production of Richard III. When audiences
arrived for As You Like It, they saw the outhouses where poison gas had been tested
decades earlier. Cultural, intellectual, physically strenuous, and ethically problematic
forms of labor were incorporated into the audiences’ experiences of the productions.
Theater companies and collectives in West Berlin, Bochum, Bremen, and Stuttgart
highlighted historical affinities between the dramatic texts they chose to stage and the
ruined or abandoned production sites, as if a connecting thread from an earlier industrial
age had reared its head at the moment of West Germany’s expanding middle class, de-
industrialization, and closing of factories. In these contexts, theater was shown to be a
cultural product enmeshed in the forces of production and consumption. Audiences were
seated on wooden planks, challenged to withstand freezing temperatures, and asked to
run, walk, stand and lie down. They abstained from going to the bathroom for hours and
took long bus rides or carpooled to city limits, navigating side streets to reach remote

665
Ronny Loewy, “‘The Past in the Present’: The Films of Producer Artur Brauner and
the Dominant Narratives of the Genocide of European Jews in German Cinema,” in Jean-
Michel Frodon, Ed., Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the
Twentieth Century [2007] (Albany: State University of New York, 2010), 166
308
locations. Audiences knew that their taxes supported the state-run theater system, but
when they stepped inside film studios and factories, they were outside the public, civic
realm. Their positions as occupants of someone else’s space, a fascist or industrial,
working-class space, was not masked but accentuated.

Staged Space after Installation Art

The most Brechtian of all West German theaters in the 1970s was the Schaubühne
in West Berlin under the direction of Peter Stein. Stein made no secret of his skepticism
of the military-industrial complex or of the West German government that provided his
salary; he lost his job for collecting donations to the Viet Cong after his 1969 Munich
production of Peter Weiss’ controversial new play Viet Nam Discourse (Viet Nam
Diskurs).
666
Shortly after the student uprisings of 1968, the Berlin Schaubühne underwent
a process of reorganization and re-opened as a Marxist collective in Kreuzberg, an
ethnically diverse, working-class neighborhood in West Berlin.
667
Their first production
in 1970 was Brecht’s The Mother, for which the audience was seated in the round with
images projected on the walls behind them, recalling Heartfield’s projections for Brecht’s
1951 production of the same play (fig. 16). The Schaubühne’s location, next to the
Landwehr Canal where the political figure Rosa Luxemburg's body was found after her

666
Peter Weiss wrote the controversial play in 1968 as a criticism of American foreign
policy. See Olaf Berwald, An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss (Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2003), 27.
667
Peter Stein “Alles auf die Veränderbarkeit hin untersuchen: Tendenzen-Interview mit
der Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer in Westberlin,” Tendenzen 88. 14 (Apr/May 1973):
14-18; Peter Stein, “‘Das Ensemble ist mißvergnügt’: SPIEGEL-Interview mit dem
Regisseur Peter Stein über den 'Peer Gynt'-Erfolg der Berliner Schaubühne,” Der Spiegel
(24 May 1971) in ADK Schaubühne Archiv.
309
assassination, was among the most significant in Berlin’s history of socialism. The
Schaubühne members ate together in the cafeteria and engaged in text-based discussions
of Marxist and Brechtian theory.
668
They attempted to draw workers to their productions
with discounted or free tickets and toured to factories and union halls.
669
These were
homages to Brecht, and especially Piscator, who allowed factory-working audiences to
pay 1.50 Marks for a performance that wealthier audiences would see for up to 100
Marks.
670
Stein’s most memorable productions in Berlin, and those most consistent with
his anti-institutional stance, either took place in alternative locations outside the theater or
required a drastic reconfiguration of the theater.
In 1971, the Schaubühne gutted its Berlin venue and rebuilt the interior for a
production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Rather than using the theater stage on the far
wall, Stein and Herrmann once more located the action in the center of the hall. A plan
and elevation show how Herrmann and Stein covered over the theater’s graduated seating
with an undulating floor and built bleachers on the long sides, as in a tennis court (fig.
17a-b). Actors carried some of the scenery into the arena while other pieces, such as an
enormous sphinx, emerged from the floor mechanically (fig. 18). The stage’s automation
in such instances resembled the rapidly sliding set pieces Zadek and Minks developed in
Bremen in the 1960s and the conveyor belt George Grosz and John Heartfield fashioned
for Piscator’s The Good Soldier Schwejk in 1927. While Peer Gynt did not take place in

668
Ulrich Meister, “Ein Ensemble macht Theatergeschichte: Die ‘Schaubühne’ in
Berlin,” Schaffhauser Nachrichten 110.123 (29 May 1971): 7 in ADK Schaubühne
Archive, Peer Gynt, folder 50.
669
Sarah Bryant-Bertail, “Peer Gynt as Epic Theater: Peter Stein in Berlin and Rustom
Bharucha in India,” Space and Time in Epic Theater: The Brechtian Legacy (Rochester,
NY and Suffolk, UK: Camden House, 2000), 129.
670
Patterson, 120.
310
an alternative location, it did adopt principles of epic theater and contemporary art to
defamiliarize the theater house.
The dramaturge, Botho Strauß, encouraged Stein and Herrmann to make the
underworld of trolls into, “a vision of a Grandville-style zoo, a Narrhalla gathering, and a
Kienholz assemblage.”
671
This quotation was reproduced in a documentation book that
the company made available for purchase. In light of Strauß’ third reference one can see
how Kienholz’s abject assemblage aesthetic in works such as Roxy’s at documenta IV in
1968 (see fig. 6-7) was a defining feature of the troll kingdom in Peer Gynt (fig. 19).
Herrmann’s animal masks and shoddily constructed camels and swine on wooden wheels
approximated the mannequin heads, skulls, and assemblages in Roxy’s. One critic
remarked, “time is contracted in the various scenic arrangements and the duration of the
‘tableaux’ (yes, one might think of Kienholz) is consolidated.”
672
Stein and Herrmann
also used Kienholz’s installation strategy of implicating viewers in a given scene rather
than allowing them the distance of a Guckkasten viewer.
Some Peer Gynt audience members were inches from the actors and all were
visible to those seated against the facing wall (fig. 20). While they did not have to leave
their seats during the production, as in the Stuttgart Faust, one critic describes how,
“when the tree branch, whips, and axes were being swung, the audience all flinched and

671
J.J. Grandville was a nineteenth-century caricaturist who created a metamorphic
species with human bodies and animalistic heads and Narrhallah a German carnivalesque
festival. The quotation comes from Peer Gynt, ein Schauspiel aus dem neunzehnten
Jahrhundert. Dokumentation der Schaubühnen-Inszenierung, Berlin 1971, ed. Ellen
Hammer, Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Both Strauß (Berlin: Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer,
Verlag Albert Hentrich, 1971), 74.
672
“Die Zeit wird in Arrangements zusammengezogen und über die jeweilige Dauer zum
‘Tableaux’ (ja man darf an Kienholz denken) verfestigt.” Ulrich Meister, “Ein Ensemble
macht Theatergeschichte: Die ‘Schaubühne’ in Berlin,” Schaffhauser Nachrichten
110.123 (29 May 1971): 7 in ADK – Schaubühne Archive, Peer Gynt, folder 50.
311
ducked their heads in unison.”
673
Echoing Brecht’s comments that theatergoing should be
like athletic spectating, critics noticed that the arrangement of the theater offered an
entirely new perspective: “it implies a new audience consciousness… more like a circus,
racetrack, or boxing match, in which you are personally affected by what is
happening.”
674
That Herrmann completely remade the interior signaled needs, such as the
audience’s visibility, a collective viewing experience, and the eradication of a backstage,
which a traditional theater house could not provide. The company rebuilt the arena in
Zurich’s old equestrian hall for a tour the following year and installed it once more in
Berlin’s convention center for a television filming.
675

The other production that took a similarly keen eye to installation art and
developed proto-site-specific environments within the theater house was Peymann and
Freyer’s 1977 Faust in Stuttgart.
676
The Staatstheater Stuttgart was one of the high profile
theaters in West Germany, in a class with the Theater Bremen and the Berlin
Schaubühne.
677
Leading up to the production, Peymann attended other site-specific

673
“Das Publikum hockt an den beiden Längsseiten auf harten, steilen Galeriepritschen.
Es ist hautnah am Geschehen beteiligt. Wenn wild Baumzweige, Peitschen und Äxte
geschwungen werden, zucken die Köpfe zusammen” in Heinz Ritter, “Peer Gynt -
schööön! Der längste Ibsen den es je gab: Peter Steins Abenteuer in der Schaubühne,”
Der Abend, West Berlin (15 May 1971) in ADK – Schaubühne Archive, Peer Gynt,
folder 44.
674
Dieter Hildebrandt, “Berliner Schaubühne Manege frei für Henrik Ibsen,” Publik,
Frankfurt (28 May 1971): 29 in ADK Schaubühne Archive, Peer Gynt, folder 44.
675
Gabriel Heim, “Zwölf Tonnen Theater auf Reisen: En Bericht von Gabriel Heim über
die Vorarbeiten zur Peer Gynt-Aufführung in Zürich,” Zürcher Student (Feb 1972) in
ADK – Schaubühne Archive, Peer Gynt, folder 50; the television version on Das dritte
Program did not air until June 12 and 19, 1975.
676
Over the next two years, the Stuttgart Faust toured to the Berlin Theatertreffen (1977),
the Wiener Festwochen (1978), and the Deutschen Schauspielhaus Hamburg (1979).
677
Bases on an annual poll by the magazine Theater Heute, Irmgard Hobson claimed, “at
the time of the Faust staging, in February 1977, the Stuttgart State Theater had been
312
theater productions in this chapter.
678
Theater critics understood his foyer scenes as site-
specific, even comparing the production to others with more explicit changes of site, such
Grüber’s “Winterreise” and Stein’s occupation of the poison gas facility in West
Berlin.
679

When audiences arrived on the second night of the Stuttgart Faust, they were led
upstairs to the theater’s foyer, where the action was dispersed among several platforms
with drapery and lighting used to disguise the windows and concessions (fig. 21).
680
On
the ground, figures of the court juggled, played music, and mingled with the audience.
One critic described the ensuing grand carnival scene as a “parade with maximum
spectator involvement.”
681
Upon its conclusion, Faust produced the spirits of Paris and
Helen of Troy, who appeared outside the foyer windows and, overwhelmed by Helen's
beauty, he passed out. Mephisto carried Faust out of the room as the audience followed
the actors to the auditorium and took their seats.
A critic described disdainfully how the spectators were invited to leave their seats

foremost in West Germany for two years.” See Hobson, “Updating the Classics: Faust
and Iphigenie in Stuttgart, 1977,” German Studies Review (1980): 436.
678
Peymann described his reaction to both Grüber’s “Winterresie” in the Olypiastadion
and his ambulatory Faust, in the former Parisian psychiatric hospital, Salpêtrière, in
“Gespräch über Faust I und II / 25 April 1977” in Bestand: EL 221/9, Bestellnummer:
D036003/102 in Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.
679
Peter Iden, “Mit Wolfgang abwärts (Goethes Faust, von Claus Peymann inszeniert),”
Frankfurter Rundschau (1 Mar 1977); Joachim Kaiser, “Lustiger Personen als Faust-
Ersatz (Wie das Württembergische Staatstheater Teil I und II der Tragödie an zwei
Abenden präsentierte),” Süddeutsche Zeitung (1 Mar 1977) in ADK Achim Freyer
Archiv, box 475.
680
Preparatory drawings for Faust I/II, Bestand EL 221/8, Bestellnummer Nr 133 in
Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg.
681
Irmgard Hobson, “Updating the Classics: Faust and Iphigenie in Stuttgart, 1977.”
German Studies Review (1980): 440.
313
for the fourth act and had to “again schlep [‘pilgern’] to the foyer.”
682
Against a silver
lamé mountain landscape, Faust aided the Emperor in a battle from atop a tall scaffold,
while the emperor rolled through the audience on a wooden horse (fig. 22). This scene
incorporated key elements of Brecht’s stages, such as curtains that only partially reveal
the scenery’s underlying structure and support. The audience received small plastic balls
to throw across the foyer at one another, taking on the role of soldiers in Faust’s army.
683

One critic remarked that the audience “can—actually they must—partake in the battle
between the Emperor and his opponent.”
684
Another wrote, more dramatically, “heaven
and hell were brought into the upper foyer, coming in through the earth, the air, and the
windows,” and a third commented, “the entire building became a stage.”
685

According to theater scholars Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Dorothea Krauss, and
Franziska Schößler, “the emancipatory-critical nature of this redefinition of theater” in
the years following the student revolts of 1968, “was primarily reflected in the fact that
the audience was invited to participate actively in the performance, becoming directly

682
E. Hennemann-Bayer, “Ein Spektakel - aber eben nicht von Goethe (Im kleinen Haus:
Wenig von Faust zwo - mehr von Peymann und Co / Bunte Bildrevue zu der Tragödie
zweitem Teil),” Schwarzwälder Bote (2 Mar 1977) in ADK Achim Freyer Archiv, box
475.
683
Georg Hensel, “Die Seele im blauen Band (Goethes Faust, erster und zweiter Teil in
Stuttgart,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1 Mar 1977) in Ibid.
684
“…an der Schlacht zwischen Kaiser und Gegenkaiser kann (oder muß) sich das
Publikum nolens volens beteiligen” in Dietmar Polaczek, “Das Theater, von einer
Riesenfaust geschüttelt (Claus Peymann und Achim Freyer inszenierten den Faust in
Stuttgart),” Neue Zeit Graz (9 Mar 1977) in ADK Achim Freyer Archiv, box 475.
685
Hans Fröhlich, “Da kam's aus der Luft und aus dem Boden, Achim Freyer schuf
phantastische Bühnen-Räume (Claus Peymann inszenierte am Stuttgarter Schauspiel
Faust II,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten (1 Mar 1977); Horst Ogris, “Totales Theater - Auf die
Probe gestellt,” Kleine Zeitung Graz (1 Mar 1977) in ADK Achim Freyer Archiv, box
475.
314
involved.”
686
This was particularly the case in the foyer scenes, where, as one critic
described, “the audience members are lured in to becoming cast members.”
687
Some even
described Peymann and Freyer’s Faust in terms of itinerant and politically subversive
theater groups, such as the Bread and Puppet Theater and the Ronconi-Truppe, which
regularly staged theater in the streets.
688
It is somewhat of a stretch to compare these
groups with the august Staatstheater Stuttgart, which stands next to a neoclassical opera
house and across the street from the Staatsgalerie. The decision to forgo the stage as a
privileged place, however, in order to insert the audience directly into the dramatic
action, demonstrated Peymann and Freyer’s resistance to the Guckkastenbühne. On the
second, evening, as the critic Günther Scholz described, “Faust has left the cozy
Guckkasten world.”
689
Within this theater season and the following one, Grüber, Stein,
and Steckel posed further questions about where theater can occur and who can
participate by moving outside their federally furnished buildings entirely.

Theater of Democracy, Architecture of Fascism

Klaus Michael Grüber’s (1941-2008) upbringing in the shadow of the Third Reich
informed his dramaturgical decisions. As a director he was know for being “anti-

686
Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Dorothea Krauss, and Franziska Schößler, Eds. Politisches
Theater nach 1968: Regie, Dramatik, und Organisation (Frankfurt and New York:
Campus Verlag, 2006), 12.
687
Günther Scholz, “Zehn Stunden Possen mit Goethe: Kasperl Faust zwischen Himmel
und Hölle,” Deutsche Zeitung Christ und Welt (4 Mar 1977) in ADK Achim Freyer
Archiv, box 475.
688
Bernhard Häußermann, “Ein mächtig illustrierter Faust,” Hannoversche Allgemeine (2
Mar 1977) in ADK Achim Freyer Archiv, box 475.
689
Scholz, “Zehn Stunden Possen mit Goethe” (1977).
315
authoritarian” and giving his actors the freedom to deviate from the script.
690
He staged
the Weimar Classics (Goethe and Schiller) and Greek tragedies in ways that questioned
their heroes and offered psychoanalytic readings of failure or mental illness of the great
figures in the dramatic literature. It was not uncommon in his generation to respond to the
legacy of the Third Reich by completely avoiding heroic figures.
691
For Grüber,
architecture was also part of the cultural past that theater had an imperative to interrogate.
As part of a collaborative project, Antiquity Project (Antikenprojekt; 1974), Grüber
staged The Bacchae (Die Bakchen) by Euripides in West Berlin’s exposition center
(Messegelände am Funkturm).
692
The following year he staged a five-and-a-half hour
version of Goethe’s Faust in the Chapelle Saint Louis of the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris
(fig. 23). Three hundred spectators followed the actors around various chambers of the
former psychiatric hospital, at one point, lying down on the old hospital beds.
693
Grüber
gave Faust’s ambitions of imperialistic domination and wealth a gendered dimension in
this site where “hysterical” women were tortured and abused in the name of medicine.
694

690
According to Ute Uellner, “Some actors did everything in their own way and others let
[Grüber] lead them more. But he was an absolutely anti-authoritarian director.” See
Stephen Locke, “Klaus Michael Grüber,” The Drama Review 21.2 (1977): 49.
691
On anti-heroism in the postwar period, see Janet Swaffar, “Heroes and Reunification:
The Resistance of Cultural Memories from Two Germanies,” in Heroes and Heroism in
German Culture: Essays in Honor of Jost Hermand, ed. Stephen Brockmann and James
Steakley (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), 131-56.
692
Peter Stein and the dramaturge Dieter Sturm co-organized this two-night event. The
1972 revival of Stein’s Peer Gynt had taken place in this venue. See Erika Fischer-Lichte,
Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World
(Malden, MA, Oxford, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
693
Hermann Beil, Achim Freyer, Bernd Mahl, Claus Peymann, and Vera Sturm, Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Der Tragödie Erster und Zweiter Teil: Die Aufführung der
Württembergischen Staatstheater Stuttgart (Stuttgart and Zürich: Belser Verlag, 1979),
201-2.
694
See Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpêtrière, Alisa Hartz, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003);
316
More than any of Grüber’s productions, however, his fame in the postwar German
theater was secured in Hitler’s Olympiastadion in West Berlin on the two frigid
December nights in 1977 when he staged “Winterreise,” text fragments from Hölderlin’s
epistolary novel, Hyperion (fig. 24).
695
Sitting in a former nucleus of Nazi ostentation,
audiences were faced with the vulnerability of German culture and the difficulty of
celebrating German Romanticism after its co-optation by the Third Reich (Hölderlin’s
Hyperion had been distributed to inspire front-line German soldiers during the Second
World War).
696
Hölderlin’s postwar redemption had begun in 1971 with Peter Weiss’
play, “Hölderlin,” which re-cast the Romantic poet as a revolutionary and precursor for
the rebellions of 1968. In 1977, however, “Winterreise” was also the name assigned to
the first major nationwide police action against suspected terrorist organizations in West
Germany, and several years earlier, the code name for the Pinochet coup.
697

Adding to the conflicted history of the text being performed, and the site, so
arrogantly built by Hitler and Werner March, was the bombed fragment of the Anhalter
Bahnhof (train station) that Recalcati fabricated on the field, and the encampment of
Mediterranean and Turkish immigrants at its base.
698
The Anhalter Bahnhof was opened
in 1841, just two years before Hölderlin died. In 1934, city planners scrambled to

and Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in
Germany, 1890-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 25-27.
695
See Friedemann Kreuder, Formen des Erinnerns im Theater Klaus Michael Grübers
(Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2002), 71. The complete title of the work from which
Winterreise was excerpted is Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece. Wanderer through the
Night [Hyperion oder der Ermit in Griechenland. Der Wanderer durch die Nacht].
696
Heinz Mahncke, “Berliner Hölderlin-Verhöhnung,” Deutsche National-Zeitung (16
Dec 1977).
697
Karasek, “Weltflucht mit Shakespeare” (1977), 256 and Karena Niehoff, “Winter der
Seele,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (Dec. 6, 1977).
698
Thomas Friedrich, Hitler’s Berlin, Abused City (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2012), 347-49.
317
complete the S-Bahn (Stadtbahn [subway]) line through Berlin in time for the Olympics,
but work on the project continued three years past the Olympic games and the rushed
construction claimed dozens of workers’ lives.
699
Already thus marked by a string of
failures, the station was used in the Second World War to deport nearly 55,000 Jews,
earning the unfortunate nickname, Abschiedsbahnhof (farewell station).
700
It was bombed
in 1943 and twice more in 1945. In 1960, all but the central portion of the façade was
demolished. This is the fragment still stands in Berlin today, and was the piece that
Recalcati recreated for “Winterreise.”
Seated at the fifty-yard line, the sold-out audience was limited to 800 on both
nights, compared with the 87,000 who witness the 1936 games. Recalcati replaced the
grandstand with a field of gravestones and cypress trees. Cardboard boxes blew in the
wind at the far end of the stadium under the Olympic torch. Below the flame,
monumental figures of a man and a horse loomed over a carpenter whose electric saw
could be heard throughout the stadium. Professional soccer players appeared several
times, running with the ball across the field and engaging the Schaubühne actors. Like
Jesse Owens, Hyperion ran the track while breathlessly reciting the poem, chased, at one
point, by Jeeps with glaring searchlights. At certain moments, Hölderlin’s text fragments
flashed up on the enormous LCD scoreboard as if one team had just scored a goal.
Like the Schaubühne’s arena seating for Peer Gynt, “Winterreise” simulated the
Brechtian paradigm of theater as sporting event. Audience members sitting in the round
were visible to one another and thus incorporated into the dramaturgical space as visual

699
See Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome, John McBrewster, Eds. Berlin Anhalter
Bahnhof (Saarbrücken: Alphascript, 2010).
700
Todd Samuel Presner. Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007), 205.
318
elements of the scenery. In 1926 Brecht enviously compared theaters to athletic arenas:
“We can’t deny it – we’ve got our eyes on those enormous concrete bowls, filled with
15,000 human beings of every class and every physiognomy, the fairest and shrewdest
audience in the world.”
701
Brecht admired that sporting events formed “expert” audiences
who came to both enjoy and critically analyze what transpired before them. He described
athletes as “highly trained individuals displaying a keen sense of responsibility but at the
same time making us believe they are acting primarily for their own enjoyment.”
702

Grüber’s actors, many of whom also performed in Stein’s Peer Gynt and As You Like It,
demonstrated this Brechtian absorption in their talent while also turning to the audience
at key moments to make direct appeals. Spectators drank heavily and freely yelled out
their reactions in response to the dramatic action.
703

Although Recalcati’s painting had been featured in a 1970 survey text of Pop art
and he was exhibiting widely at international art fairs and museums alongside Nouveau
Réaliste, installation, and assemblage artists, the revival of epic theater in “Winterreise”
was less dependent on a visual intervention within the site, than it was on the site itself.
704

To occupy a space built expressly for Nazi pomp and ostentation was a already a
historically loaded experience during the “German Autumn” and amid ongoing

701
Bertolt Brecht, “More Good Sport,” [Mehr guten Sport; 1926] reprinted in English
translation in Brecht on Theatre, 3
rd
Edition, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom
Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 25.
702
Ibid.
703
Paul Moor reported that many attendees showed up with thermos’ of alcohol,
becoming increasingly rowdy and vocal, in “Winter’s Tale from Berlin: Football comes
to Hölderlin,” The Times (31 Jan 1978). ADK Schaubühne Archiv, folder 431.
704
Recalcati’s painting D’après Kafka (According to Kafka; 1964) was featured
alongside works by Joseph Beuys, Richard Hamilton, Edward Kienholz, Roy
Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, George Segal, Daniel Spoerri, and
others, in POP ART: Nieuwe Figuratie, Nouveau Réalisme, ed. André de Rache
(Brussels: Casino Communal, 1970).
319
revelations of former Nazis at every level of German society. This uncomfortable
confrontation of the past demanded new forms of engagement in order to overcome the
awe and submission the site was intended to encourage. Grüber and Recalcati’s
thematization of German history was once more a central theme in Stein’s As You Like It.
Shortly after the run of Peer Gynt ended in 1972, the Schaubühne took up
residence in the former Central Cinema Company (CCC) Film Studio in the Spandau
suburb of Berlin. Built as a Nazi poison gas factory, it was converted into a film studio in
1949, and remained unused since 1970.
705
The labor that transpired on the site of the film
studio was not simply that of a Fordist production line. When the exiled director Artur
Brauner returned to Germany almost immediately after World War II, he founded CCC,
and in 1949 bought and renovated the Berlin-Spandau location.
706
The quarrelsome casts
of Brauner’s first films—comprised of returning Jewish exiles and former Nazis—
reported headaches and illness from poison gasses that continued to seep out of the
facility’s walls.
707
Although the health risks were no longer present in the 1970s, it was
against this historical backdrop of Nazi poison combined with the revival of Weimar film
culture that the Schaubühne invited audiences to consider Shakespeare’s As You like It.
The Schaubühne’s As You Like It and Peter Zadek’s Hamlet, discussed shortly,
led critics to conclude that the institution of theater was rebelling against itself. The
prominent critic, Günther Scholz, for instance, wrote, “our theater professionals appear to

705
Tim Bergfelder, International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European
Co-Productions in the 1960s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 106.
706
Hans-Michael Bock and Tim Bergfelder, eds., The Concise Cinegraph:
Encyclopaedia of German Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 60-61.
707
David Kalat, The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Films and Five
Novels (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 113.
320
hate the theater. Increasingly, they pull out theater stages in factory halls and studios.”
708

Scholz and others invoked the soliloquy “All the world is a stage” from As You Like It as
a metaphor for theater’s move away from the architectural confines of the institution.
709

Leading up to the 1977 As You Like It production the company spent nearly five years
immersed in Shakespeare and Renaissance scholarship, learning acrobatics and period
instruments such as the lute. For two evenings in December 1976, the ensemble presented
the results of their undertaking in a production titled Shakespeare’s Memory. In addition
to preparing the actors for future Shakespearian roles, the ensemble aimed to recover a
historically sensitive atmosphere of Elizabethan culture. Platforms were set up to
resemble market stalls, the sites of modern Europe’s first theater performances.
710
The
audience wandered from one station to the next in the enormous hall as the ensemble
danced, dueled, made music, walked tight-rope, juggled, and recited period texts. In the
second half of the production, the audience was invited to eat and drink at large banquet
tables while watching the performers. The preparation that went into Shakespeare’s
Memory was intended as a primer for As You Like It, which opened in September 1977.
711

The designer, Herrmann, transformed the foyer of the building into a white hall,
approximating the exterior of a Renaissance palace, where the court scenes took place
over the first forty-five minutes (fig. 25). The audience was crammed into the center of

708
“Unsere Theaterleute scheinen die Theater zu hassen. Immer häufiger ziehen sie aus
Bühnenhäusern in Fabrikhallen und Studios.” Günther Scholz, “Das Theater auf der
Flucht in die Hallen: Zu Peter Steins uns Peter Zadeks Shakespeare-Inszenierungen,”
Deutsche Zeitung Christ und Welt (7 Oct 1977) in ADK Schaubühne Archive folder 429.
709
Ibid.
710
Ronald W. Vince, Ancient and Medieval Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook
(Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1984), 141.
711
The production ran for thirty nights. It was revived in 1978 and traveled to Zurich,
also in a large hall rather than a theater house. It was broadcast on August 18, 1988
(Easter Sunday) at 10:55pm on ZDF, as the third in a cycle of productions by Peter Stein.
321
the space, while the actors, in stiff, dark Elizabethan costumes, performed on tall
platforms around the edges of the room. Stein took advantage of the staged wrestling
match already in Shakespeare’s script to highlight the Brechtian notion of theater as a
sporting match.
712
Towering over a scrawny Orlando, a professional heavyweight
wrestler managed a few arm locks but eventually Orlando flipped the behemoth over his
head and tossed him to the ground.
713
The audience played the roles of peasants and
members of court, attending to the royalty on the platforms above and constantly craning
their necks and pivoting to face the action as it moved from one side of the room to
another. When the insecure Duke Frederick banished Rosalind to the Arden forest toward
the end of the first act, the audience joined the actors on their journey into the woods.
714

For fifteen minutes, they filed through narrow corridors with wild plants, dripping
grottos, a sandy desert, and pools of water. They walked past woodworking tools, skeletal
fragments, taxidermic animals, and mannequins. One critic reported, “we were brought
into motion, as a mass of spectators. Instead of having the stage bring us the new scene,
we had to go wandering in search of it ourselves.”
715

712
Brecht wrote in 1920, “You can see inside people, if you look closely enough – just
like in a wrestling match, what’s interesting are the small, subtle tricks” in Bertolt Brecht,
“Theatre as Sport,” [Das Theater als Sport; 1920] translated and reprinted in Brecht on
Theatre, 3
rd
Edition, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 25.
713
Duke Frederick usurps the throne form his brother, Duke Senior, and banishes Senior
to the wilderness of the Arden Forest, taking in Senior’s daughter, Rosalind, to live with
him and his daughter Celia. The wrestling match is between Orlando, the youngest son of
Frederick’s archenemy, and Charles, Duke Frederick’s champion wrestler.
714
Rosalind and Frederick’s daughter, Celia, leave in disguise, accompanied by
Touchstone, the court jester. Orlando also retreats into the forest with his servant Adam.
715
“Wir werden als Zuschauermasse in Bewegung gebracht. Nicht die Bühne bringt uns
den neuen Schauplatz vor Augen. Wir selber müssen einzeln auf die Wanderschaft
gehen.” Friedrich Luft, “Der Schöne Wald vertilgt das Wort,” Die Welt, Hamburg (22
Sept 1977) in ADK Schaubühne Archive folder 429.
322
Another critic wrote, “in Stein’s productions we, the spectators, play along in our
roles; he uses us in almost every one of his performances… He won’t leave us alone to
just sit and watch. We must stand for entire acts, be relocated here and there.”
716
Another
claimed, “The audience is integrated into the plot.”
717
The same could be said for the
installation art that Stein quoted—Thek here and Kienholz elsewhere—that its viewers
became the subjects of their own spectatorial activity. At the end of the maze, the path
opened into a cavernous and densely wooded ravine with logs, an oak tree, a pond,
thickets, and catwalks suspended from the ceiling of the enormous hall (fig. 26).
Audience bleachers were built into the steeply sloping hills of the ravine around a central
playing area.
718
The multisensory environment included a swaying cornfield, a gurgling
pond, bleating goats, chirping birds, distant hunting horns, sunlight shining through tree
branches, a wind machine, and ruffling leaves.
In spite of a sense of amazement at the installation, most critics reported the
audience’s exasperation or fatigue. One complained, “it was past midnight when the
audience was finally dismissed from hard uncomfortable seats… anyone who came with
public transportation could scarcely have returned home before 1:30 or 2:00 in the

716
“In Stein-Aufführungen spielen wir, die Zuschauern, längst unsere Rollen, in fast
jeder seiner Inszenierungen besetzt Stein uns schon um... läßt uns dieser Stein im Theater
nicht mehr in Ruhe sitzen und zuschauen. Wir müssen ganze Akte lang herumstehen,
werden umhergeschoben.” Wolfgang Ignée, “Weltflucht ist nicht möglich: Peter Stein
inszeniert Wie es euch gefällt in Berlin,” Stuttgarter Zeitung (26 Sept 1977) in ADK
Schaubühne Archive folder 429.
717
“Das Publikum ist also in die Handlung integriert.” Hellmut Kotschenreuther,
“Visionen vom Zauberwald: Genialisch und ausschweifend: Shakespeare nach Art der
Berliner Schaubühne,” Kieler Nachrichten (22 Sept 1977) in ADK Schaubühne Archive
folder 429.
718
Ibid.
323
morning. When one has to be at work five hours later, who can afford such a theater?”
719

The Schaubühne did in fact arrange for a bus to bring audiences out to Spandau and also
responded by moving the start-time up by half an hour midway through the run. Older
audience members were irritated with the uninterrupted four-hour production and the
standing segment. Several “reached the physical limits of what can be expected of a
theater audience over thirty-five years old,” claiming that the director and designer were
“so caught up in the details that they forget to think about the limits of their own
audience’s patience,” denying “any opportunity whatsoever to respond to the call of
nature.”
720
When critics complained of Peter Zadek’s harsh audience lighting in his Pop
art productions of the mid-1960s, Zadek replied that the Brechtian tactic forced the
audience to concentrate, not only on the stage, but on their own activity as spectators. I
suggest that the discomfort the audience voiced in regards to Stein’s productions be
understood in a similar vein.
Stein’s singular attempts in West Germany to revive Brechtian theater, not just as
an abstract ideal of defamiliarization effects, but as a Marxist collective, were also

719
“Erst nach Mitternacht wird das Publikum, das dichtgedrängt gestanden oder auf auf
harten, unbequemen Stühlen gesessen hat, entlassen. Wer nicht mit dem eigenen Pkw
kam, sondern einen Bus oder andere öffentliche Verkehrsmittel benutzen mußte, war
kaum vor 1.30 oder 2.00 Uhr früh zu Hause. Doch welcher Mensch, der vielleicht schon
fünf Stunden später wieder am Arbeitsplatz sein muß, kann sich einen solchen
Theaterbesuch leisten?” in Hans Dornbrach, “Strapaziöse Shakespeare-Inszenierung:
Berliner Festwochen” Flensburger Tageblatt (28 Sept 1977) in ADK Schaubühne
Archive folder 429.
720
“Denn Stein erreicht hier die Grenzen dessen, was einem normalen Theater-Publikum
über 35 Jahre körperlich zugemutet werden kann” in Ibid; “so in das Detail verbeißen,
daß sie vergessen, an die Besucher und deren Konzentrationsfähigkeit zu denken” in KE,
“Grandios und problematisch: Die Berliner Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer spielt
Shakespeares Wie es euch gefällt,” Die Rheinpfalz Unterhaardter Rundschau (23 Sept
1977); and Paul Moor, “Berlin’s uncomfortable way with Shakespeare,” The Times (12
Oct 1977) in ADK Schaubühne Archive folder 429.
324
controversial. Staging As You Like It—a play about finding contentment in an alternative
lifestyle—in a former Nazi poison gas facility, allowed Stein to take a critical position on
German history that could not have been made as explicitly within the walls of a
federally-funded institutional structure. While both the former Nazi structure and a plush
theater house are ideologically determined spaces, the politics of the former site were
highlighted by the events of the German Autumn. The main targets of RAF attacks were
West German government officials and wealthy entrepreneurs who had held prominent
positions in the Third Reich. By standing for the first hour, climbing through a labyrinth,
and sitting on hard benches for the next four hours, the audience of As You Like It
performed the symbolic transformation of a building constructed to serve a program of
systematic murder into a space in which the legacy of the Nazi past could be reconciled
with the democratic progress in its wake. This was not the political mobilization that
Piscator and Heartfield affected in the 1920s, in which the audience was supposed to run
out of the theater and take to the streets, but it was the ethical decision-making and
complicity in history that Brecht stressed in his writings on epic theater.

Shakespeare on the Production Line

The term “de-industrialization” came into usage in Western Europe in the 1970s
in response to factory closings and the “end”—or rather outsourcing—of Fordist
production methods.
721
Former sites of industrial production were re-activated in this

721
Christopher Johnson, “Introduction,” in De-industrialization: Social, Cultural, and
Political Aspects, ed. Bert Altena and Marcel van der Linden (New York and Cambridge,
UK: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 2002), 7.
325
period by theater producers in the moment of West Germany’s de-industrialization. Such
productions used decaying monuments of capitalist production to address the legacies of
Piscator, Brecht, and epic theater.
722
The Schauspielhaus Bochum and the Theater
Bremen did not conceal the labor of stagehands and cast members behind curtains but
made it explicit within the factory walls that were constructed to conceal the sight of
backbreaking labor from precisely the middle class consumers that sat within them.
Hamlet and Richard III are plays by Shakespeare that detail the decadence, decline, and
despair of the powerful. The crumbling production lines that served as backdrops to these
dramas did not return epic theater to the workers for (and by) whom it was originally
practiced. The laborers who once operated these factories were gone by the late 1970s.
These “post-industrial” productions, however, allowed a re-evaluation of the legacy of
epic theater from a historical moment that seemed to be the terminus of the capitalist age
that epic theater was originally designed to combat.
Following his work in Bremen with Minks, Zadek moved to the Schauspielhaus
Bochum in 1972, which theater critics in West Germany discussed as a site for
particularly visual, Brechtian experimentation.
723
In 1977, Zadek and the designer Peter
Pabst identified an abandoned factory in the Hamme district of Bochum as the site for the

722
See Stefan Goch, “Betterment without Airs: Social, Cultural, and Political
Consequences of the De-industrialization in the Ruhr,” in Bert Altena and Marcel van der
Linden, Eds., De-industrialization: Social, Cultural, and Political Aspects (New York
and Cambridge, UK: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 2002), 87-112.
723
Elain Harwood writes, “two of the most highly regarded directors made their
reputations at the Bochum Schauspielhaus, the English-raised Peter Zadek, in 1972-79,
followed by Claus Peymann.” Elain Harwood, “Theatres in West Germany, 1945-70” in
Setting the Scene: Perspectives in Twentieth-Century Theatre Architecture, ed. Alistair
Fair (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 109.
326
Hamlet.
724
They repaired the building, and rehearsed and performed in it. Zadek’s final
production with the Schauspielhaus Bochum positioned himself and his actors and staff
as cultural producers whose activity belongs in a factory as much as anywhere else.
Zadek and Pabst discovered the factory in disarray. Timber was strewn about, an
old car left behind, and windows cracked. Until a few years prior to Hamlet, the factory
was producing license plates for automobiles.
725
As with the previous productions, the
audience was told ahead of time that the production would be held in an alternative
location, and it was this knowledge of what the site had been in the past that gave the re-
reading of Shakespeare its historical specificity as a comment on the corrupting power of
capital. The director and designer began by emptying out the building so that they could
re-think the physical relationship of stage to audience without predetermined
performance areas or seating arrangements. Using drywall, Zadek and Pabst built a series
of rooms on either side for props and costume changes, but left a large rectangular space
open, roughly one hundred by forty-five feet, and retained the clerestory windows to
allow in natural light (fig. 27).
726
Despite these minor renovations, photographs from
1977 of the building’s exterior show that the site still maintained its character as a “post-
industrial” shed, not a house of culture (fig. 28 a-b).
The most obvious departure from the format of the theater house was the dispersal
of action among a series of loosely defined spaces around the arena, with the audience

724
Benjamin Henrichs, “Hamlet, ein Abschied,” Die Zeit 42 (7 Oct 1977): 67.
725
Peter Zadek, “Hamlet – ein Trauerspiel als Operette,” Stern Magazin 40 (22 Sept
1977): 49. Although a tantalizing correspondence to site as readymade, Zadek’s archive
contains no evidence he knew of Marcel Duchamp’s Faux Vagina (1963), Duchamp’s
Volkswagen’s license plate mounted on Plexiglass and wood. See Thomas Zaunschirm,
“Faux Vagina” in Faux Vagina: Marcel Duchamps letztes Readymade, ed. Gerhard
Graulich and Kornelia Röder (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2014), 19-44.
726
Zadek, “Hamlet – ein Trauerspiel als Operette” (1977), 49.
327
seated throughout in seemingly unsystematic arrangements (fig. 29). The square that
appears in the center of the arena indicates stunt mats for duels, jumps, and falls, not a
raised stage. The author of an extensive article on the production in Stern magazine
wrote, “there is no stage as such… One does not look, as usual, into a ‘Guckkasten’ stage
but rather to many different stage-like areas surrounded by the roughly 300 audience
seats.”
727
Though carefully plotted out according to a floor plan, the seating appeared
arbitrary with a mix of vintage cinema chairs, sofas, and other upholstered furniture. The
center of the concrete floor was padded with gym mats to cushion the actors’ jumps, falls,
and duels. Some architectural features such as exposed brick wall and steel rafters
remained visible, but much of the periphery and ceiling was cloaked in dark, billowy
drapery that approximated storm clouds. Sinister characters, such as Polonius, made
dramatic entrances through the creaky steel doors, as the factory’s foremen might have
done years ago. Harsh fluorescent lighting remained on throughout the production
making audience members visible and drawing them into the space of the actors.
Publicity materials hinted that the factory-site would entail a sense of adventure.
One advertisement, which was reproduced in a published program book, included a map
with a dotted line leading down a side street to the abandoned factory (fig. 30).
728
This
image included landmarks, such as the city hall and the theater house, using dotted lines
and directional arrows to suggest routes attendees might take. It is similar to the maps
Wolf Vostell developed over the previous decade to instruct participants in his décollage-
Happenings and to document them afterward. His nein—9—dé-coll/agen (no/nine—9—

727
“Dafür gibt es keine Bühne… Man blickt nicht, wie üblich, in die 'Guckkasten'-
Bühne, sondern auf viele Spielflächen inmitten der rund 300 Plätze für die Zuschauer” in
Peter Zadek, “Hamlet – ein Trauerspiel als Operette” (1977): 49.
728
In ADK – Peter Zadek Archiv, Hamlet in Hamme, 1977.
328
décollages), for instance, is a diagram that Vostell made in 1966 to document a 1963
Happening in Wuppertal, which brought participants from a factory in the north to a
public garage in the east, among other locations (fig. 31).
The theater critic Kurt Ziegler found the location of Hamlet historically sensitive,
remarking, “what a clever move to sidestep the theater altogether and relocate to the
factory, as Shakespeare’s troupe once upon a time went to perform at the fair.”
729
The
production did in fact tour to Munich, where Zadek found a circus in which to stage it,
also with the audience seated in the round, and explicitly not in a theater house.
730
The
factory in Bochum bore few visual indicators that the event was associated with a theater,
save for uniformed ushers. Some attendees wore suits but many arrived in jeans and
flannel shirts, suggesting that the change of venue was met with assumptions about what
kind of experience was on offer.
731
While Pabst and Zadek transformed the space
significantly, they also left key features that reminded audiences of its industrial history.
One critic reported, “the hall looks like a junkyard with refuse and broken theater
props.”
732
The King’s court included a harpsichord, a wardrobe, a human skeleton, a
mannequin, and a taxidermic eagle, among other pieces strewn about. The historian
Lawrence Gunter remarked that the eclectic and chaotic scenic concept approached a

729
“Welch kluger Plan, auf der Gückkastenbühne zu verzichten und in die Fabrik zu
gehen, wie einst die Shakespeare-Truppe auf den Jahrmarkt.” Kurt Ziegler, “Blutsudelei
hat dieser ‘Hamlet’ gar nicht nötig,” Westfälische Rundschau (3 Oct 1977) in ADK
Dokfonds Theater Archiv, 3698.
730
See Zadek, “Hamlet - ein Trauerspiel als Operette” (1977): 38-50.
731
Eo Plunien, “Hamlet in der Fabrik,” Die Welt (4 Oct 1977) in ADK Dokfonds Theater
Archiv, 3698; and Lawrence Gunter, “From Elsinore to Brussels: Shakespeare as
Transnational Discourse on the German Stage,” in Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng
Lim, eds., Shakespeare without English: The Reception of Shakespeare in Non-
Anglophone Countries (Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2006), 160.
732
Peter, “Hamlet – ein Trauerspiel als Operette” (1977): 49.
329
historically accurate picture of Elizabethan history: “It were as if the West German
director Peter Zadek had taken a clue from the East German scholar and critic Robert
Weimann, who had insisted that the elements of ‘mingle mangle’ and ‘gaulimaufry’ were
primary characteristics of Elizabethan popular culture.”
733

Zadek also used a pin board, near one of the doors between the costume closet
and the central acting area, to display a collage of images he collected (fig. 32). “This is
associative material,” he explained, “I bring these images and film stills to stimulate the
actors.”
734
This curated picture atlas was not a straightforward continuation of Zadek’s
fascination with Pop art and Nouveau Réalisme. The critic Volker Canaris wrote, “a
collection of pictures and photographs of the most heterogeneous origin, which hangs on
one of the walls of the environment for Hamlet, shares with the audience at intermission
some of the moments in the evolution of the production… Zadek’s Shakespeare theatre
makes radical use of extremely heterogeneous theatre conventions for the fabrication of
his own iconography, the language of images.”
735
The reproductions ranged from Italian
comic book frames and pinup girls to Rembrandt engravings and film stills. Fortinbras
and Claudius were based on cartoon characters. Hamlet mimicked an iconic photograph
of Oscar Wilde wearing a fur coat and reclining and buried his head in his mother’s bare
breasts at one point, as does the figure in an Otto Dix painting reproduced on the pin
board. Cranach's painting of Judith inspired the character of Ophelia, and the god Siva

733
Lawrence Gunter in Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng Lim, 160. Quotation comes
from Robert Weimann and Robert Schwartz, eds., Shakespeare and the Popular
Tradition in the Theatre: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and
Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
734
Peter Zadek, “Hamlet” (1977): 49-50.
735
Volker Canaris, “Peter Zadek and Hamlet,” trans. Brigitte Kueppers, The Drama
Review 24.1 (Mar 1980), 55, 62.
330
informed the characterization of Gertrude. During the intermission attendees had a closer
look at the images, which were not only preparatory materials, but also display pieces,
installed as part of the scenic design.
Critics compared Zadek’s Hamlet to Stein’s As You Like It, noting that both
registered a move away from traditional theater buildings for staging the classical
repertoire.
736
Like Stein’s productions, the visual integration of audience and stage
resembles a precedent in seventeenth-century French theaters in which aristocratic
patrons were allowed to sit on stage or in the wings. The Bochum factory looked like a
modern version of Molière’s theater, which allowed dozens of privileged spectators on
stage, or the seventeenth-century Comédie-Française, whose stage accommodated nearly
two hundred spectators sitting and milling about the stage, feigning over-the-top
reactions.
737
Whereas these historical precursors distinguished elite spectators from those
in the parterre, the Bochum production’s intermingling of audience and actors formed a
collective out of a group of individuals, all responding to the same scenario.
In order to integrate the audience’s reactions into the work, Pabst and Zadek made
sure they were well lit at all times, a classic tenet of Brechtian theater discussed in the
first two chapters. Volker Canaris wrote that the Bochum audience was, “gathered around
the performance area, spatially included and in direct connection with the action. Never

736
Günther Scholz, “Das Theater auf der Flucht in die Hallen: Zu Peter Steins und Peter
Zadeks Shakespeare-Inszenierungen” Deutsche Zeitung 42 (Oct 1977); Joachim Kaiser,
“Hamlet - Schauerstück um klugen Clown?” Süddeutsche Zeitung (3 Oct 1977) in ADK
Dokfonds Theater Archiv, 3698.
737
This practice was done away with in the eighteenth century because of how distracting
it became. See William D. Howarth, “French Renaissance and Neo-Classical Theatre,” in
The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, ed John Russell Brown (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 247-9. For Molière’s description of how difficult
it was for the audience to separate actors from on-stage spectators, see A.M. Nagler, A
Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), 192-4.
331
in isolation, the actors relate continuously to the audience.”
738
Theater historian Ron
Engle noted, “Zadek has invited audiences to vocalize their feelings and emotions while
watching a production. In much the same way as spectators shout at a soccer game,
audience members in the theatre should be provoked into participation.”
739
In the fatal
duel between Hamlet and Laertes, an actor stepped up to a microphone and in the urgent
yet impartial tone of a sports commentator, reported, “at last, the long-awaited duel
between Hamlet and Laertes. It’s a shame you can’t be in the arena, dear viewers. The
excitement is unbearable. They cross swords. The king is betting on Hamlet’s victory.
Hamlet sweats. Does he have enough stamina? Now a pause, maybe we can talk to him
… How do you feel, Mr. Hamlet?”
740
Following the bloody showdown, an actor dressed
as a photojournalist came out to photograph the bodies. The reporter and photographer’s
detachment from the horrific bloodshed that unfolded made a mockery of the media’s
sensationalizing of traumatic events and, perhaps more importantly, was also a typical
feature of epic theater.
By demonstrating different levels of investment in the fictional scenario—those of
Shakespeare’s characters, the outside commentator and documenter, and the audience—
Zadek underscored the audience’s own moral reflection. They had become bystanders to
a horrible bloodbath, and at the same time came face to face with an unglamorous
workplace they may not otherwise have known. This intersection of Shakespeare and a

738
Volker Canaris, “Peter Zadek and Hamlet” (1980), 56.
739
Ron Engle, “Audience, Style, and Language in the Shakespeare of Peter Zadek,” in
Dennis Kennedy, ed., Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 94, 95.
740
Text taken from the article “Hamlet – ein Trauerspiel als Operette” (1977): 49.
332
site of former capitalist labor rendered the audience conscious participants in the relations
of production and consumption and thus took on a didactic, epic dimension.
The following year, the director Frank-Patrick Steckel worked with Zadek’s
former ensemble, the Theater Bremen, to stage a site-specific production of The
Coronation of Richard III (Die Krönung Richards III). This is a Weimar-era adaptation
of Shakespeare’s Richard III by Hans Henny Jahnn. Instead of the theater’s normal house
where the Pop-art productions in chapter two took place, this one was rehearsed and
staged in a condemned slaughterhouse in Bremen (fig. 33). A building that once
accommodated the systematic death and disembodiment of animals was made over to tell
of Richard’s destructive quest for power. The building was condemned for demolition at
the time of the production and was visibly haunted by its past. Dark splotches of blood
were visible on the walls and the stench of rotting flesh lingered. The type of labor being
dramatized was that of slaughter.
Jahnn’s 1921 play is a homoerotic elaboration on Shakespeare’s script about the
last King of the House of York, whose short reign was marked out by numerous murders,
turbulent battles, and rebellion.
741
Some literary critics compare Jahnn to the
Expressionist author, Alfred Döblin, and others have criticized him for gratuitous
violence and melodramatic plot twists.
742
In 1920, Brecht directed Jahnn’s first play, the
Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1916-1917), which, at the time, was controversial for its
criticisms of Christian morality. For The Coronation of Richard III, Jahnn gave the
protagonist an equally ferocious counterpart in Queen Elizabeth, who seduces court pages

741
For an analysis of Jahnn’s adaptation, see Ruby Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots
(Princeton: Princeton Legacy Library, 2015), 48.
742
Kurt Opitz, “In Memoriam Hans Henny Jahnn,” Books Abroad 37.1 (1963): 26-27;
Michael Feingold, “Germanic Depressives” The Village Voice. June 29, 1993: 95.
333
and then has them castrated.
743

The abandoned slaughterhouse in Bremen provided Steckel with a match for
Jahnn’s sardonic tone. Steckel first brought a plan of the Bremen slaughterhouse to a
meeting of the producers in summer 1978 and the theater had to compete in a highly
bureaucratic process with others who wanted to demolish the slaughterhouse to begin
building a convention center.
744
The remaining equipment was still in place and became
important elements in the production. Steckel identified the scale where cattle were
weighed as the royal bed. He wanted to accentuate the site’s dim lighting and booming
acoustic. During the production, Steckel directed the audience to roam about the space
and follow the action as it moved from narrow corridors to spiral stairwells and rafters.
At particular moments, benches were provided for the spectators, turning them into
members of a parliamentary court, with lords sitting around Richard’s throne on a raised
platform (fig. 34).
745
An older, historic section of the building was used for the castle and
parliamentary scene, while a later addition, which was in shambles, was used for battle
and prison scenes in the second half of the play.
746
“In this context,” explained Steckel,
“the text starts to breathe a bit more. The reality it calls for is already intrinsic to the
site.”
747
The enduring stench of blood offered a multi-sensory setting that forced the
audience to confront actual death and violence, not only the script’s simulation of those
occurrences.

743
Michael Feingold, “Forever Jahnn,” The Village Voice 35.7 (1990): S11.
744
Protocol from June 22, 1978 in ADK Frank Patrick Stecke Archiv.
745
Protocol from June 15, 1978 in Ibid.
746
Protocol from June 8, 1978 in Ibid.
747
“In diesem Gelände beginnt der Text anders zu atmen, die Realität, die der Text
braucht, hat das Gelände bereits” in Ibid.
334
Although Germany has been at the forefront of animal protection legislation and
was the “uncontested leader” in nineteenth-century slaughterhouse practices, Steckel’s
decision to locate the production in such a location recognized its grim connotations
within the German cultural imaginary.
748
The playwright Heiner Müller used the
slaughterhouse as a metaphor for German history, an image echoed by a Nazi character in
Müller’s 1977 play Germania Death in Berlin (Germania Tod in Berlin), who says,
“Welt… ist ein Schlachthaus,” (the world… is a slaughterhouse).
749
The author and film
director Alexander Kluge explains that for Müller the slaughterhouse was not only an
archetype of the Third Reich and of war, wedding organized killing and industry, but
“what he likely read as the cipher of the twentieth century: that people, once set in
motion, can no longer escape the rails subjectively.”
750
One of the most haunting
passages in Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, which Rainer Werner Fassbinder
turned into a TV miniseries in 1980, takes place in a slaughterhouse. Döblin wrote of
men chasing animals, boiling them, slitting them open, pulling back their flesh, and
jumping on them as blood bubbles out of their organs and their desperate squealing slows
to a stop. In addition to being a site for the negotiation of morality and endurance, the
slaughterhouse is the intersection of the production and consumption of animal flesh. As

748
Gary L. Francione and Robert Garner, The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or
Regulation? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 157; Paule Young Lee,
“Siting the Slaughterhouse: From Shed to Factory,” in Paula Young Lee, ed., Meat,
Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (Lebanon, NH: University of New
Hampshire Press, 2008), 62.
749
Ingo R. Stoehr, German Literature of the Twentieth-Century: from Aestheticism to
Postmodernism (Rochester, NY and Suffolk, UK: Camden House, 2001), 383.
750
Alexander Kluge, “It is a Mistake to Think that the Dead Are Dead: Obituary for
Heiner Müller,” in Michael Geyer, The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 213.
335
Döblin explains, “The cattle-yard, slaughter-house, and wholesale meat-market form an
inseparable economic whole.”
751

The slaughterhouse is where systematic killing is culturally acceptable, where life
goes in and meat comes out. The historian Veronika Fuechtner has called Döblin’s
slaughterhouse, “a metaphor for the pathology of postwar society.”
752
Slaughterhouses
were used as assembly points for deportations in Nazi Germany and numerous metaphors
for twentieth century history have also been drawn from slaughterhouse procedures.
753

On an economic level, the slaughterhouse is a site for the maximization of raw material
and profit. In such an industry, under pressure to utilize every part of an animal’s body,
the exploitation of human labor has also historically been brutally “efficient,” rewarding
unreported injuries, for example.
754
Synthesizing the views of Weimer-era playwright
Ernst Toller, Seth Knox writes, “within the exploitative system of mechanical labor, the
fate of beasts is shared by their human slaughterers… In such an environment, there is no
place for those who become ‘sentimental’ at the sight of animals and people being treated
inhumanely.”
755
Humanity and sentimentality are the prices such labor pays for efficiency

751
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz [1929] (London and New York: Continuum,
2004), 103.
752
Veronika Fuechtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar
Republic Germany and Beyond (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2011), 63.
753
See Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 187; and Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka:
Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002).
754
Eric Schlosser discusses the efficiency of slaughterhouses in Fast Food Nation: The
Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2001), 149-68.
755
Seth R. Knox, Weimer Germany between Two Worlds: The American and Russian
Travels of Kisch, Toller, Holitscher, Goldschmidt, and Rundt (New York: Peter Lang,
2006), 158.
336
and the slaughterhouse is but one extreme symbol of this. In 1977 Steckel transformed
this point of no return into the playhouse of one of history’s most reviled figures.
In The Coronation of Richard III, the slaughterhouse provided a viewing
experience more intimate than theater, as the audience positioned itself around the actors
at close range. According to the program booklet, “Every inch of playing space can be
seen by the audience. As the proscenium stage has elsewhere been swapped out for
factory buildings and abandoned cinemas, so have we in Bremen taken up residence in a
former slaughterhouse.”
756
The producers admitted that there were some drawbacks,
including the audience’s discomfort. Some had to stand the entire time and constantly
move in order to see and hear the action. The acoustics made it difficult for the audience
to understand some passages, especially when delivered from high up in the rafters (fig.
35). These were concessions Steckel was willing to make for Jahnn’s chilling script,
noting, “this project also calls for a strong and abrasive aesthetic, which is not possible in
the theater.”
757
Grüber also sacrificed audibility in the Olympiastadion the year prior.
In Steckel’s use of the slaughterhouse, the audience was denied recourse to any
sense of anonymity. There was nowhere to hide, no area cordoned off and darkened. In
addition to standing and walking around the space, Steckel’s Bremen audience was
directly spoken to and reminded of its role as Richard’s subjects. Having trained in art
history, Steckel may have been aware of the confrontational nature of contemporary
performance art and Happenings, but the superstructure he was investigating with
Richard III was larger than the discourse of performance art or of Antonin Artaud’s

756
A brochure for the Theater Bremen, printed by the Volksbühne Bremen e.V.
Besucherring für Bremer Theater, 3-8, in ADK Frank-Patrick-Steckel-Archiv.
757
Ibid. Also, Protocols from May 11 and June 1, 1978 led by Rischbieter and Steckel in
ADK Frank Patrick Steckel Archiv.
337
“Theater of Cruelty.” The production, rather, showed the dangers of regimes in which the
powerful are permitted to dispense with the lives of others. This could have been
conveyed in a theater house but, according to the multi-sensory responses of spectators, it
was particularly felt in the viscera as a result of standing in the abandoned site of
slaughter itself.

Conclusion

The case studies in this chapter constituted a return, albeit in modified form, to
proletarian and epic theater, and to the civic, working-class spaces where that theater was
first performed. For Piscator, Heartfield, and Brecht, the physical manifestation of theater
production served a political message. Their aesthetics might have become opulent in
certain productions but for the most part it was cheap and ephemeral. They could make
theater anywhere with just a few suggestive transformations. This emancipation from the
material setting was part of the brilliance of projected images. The abrasive encounter
with history that defines this chapter’s theater in ruins was, by contrast, highly dependant
on the architectural setting. The most crucial distinction between epic theater and its West
German afterlife identified here is that the original functions of the spaces these directors
occupied in the 1970s had been emptied out. Piscator and Heartfield’s productions in
meeting halls blurred a line between civic activity, political gathering, and theater
because the sites they chose were still functional as civic spaces. Postwar productions in
factories, film studios, and the like took place after the exploited workers and production
lines were gone. There was enough historical distance from the victims of the sites’
338
original labor, violence, or ideology to re-appropriate those spaces without actually
facing the historical agents who gave them their subversive character.
The locations in which site-specific theater was staged were built neither by a
scenic artist nor by a theater institution, but by and for private commercial enterprises, all
of which were dissolved by the late 1970s. Instead of offering a pleasurable form of elite
entertainment, these theater productions staged encounters with Germany’s difficult past
and brought participants into contact with neglected urban spaces and the underserved
populations living nearby. They changed the experience of set design from “what do I see
before me and how does it comment upon the pre-existing script?” to “what does it mean
for me to stand in this historically charged site?” When theater emerged outside the
institutional spaces of its cultural recognizability, its audiences and their experiences of
theatergoing, too, were defamiliarized.
In the case studies throughout this project, the theater stage was the site where
contemporary art from across Europe and the Atlantic was being conjured and
“installed.” While German stage designs appropriated visual art, from montage and
Bauhaus technologies to Pop art, Fluxus, video art, Nouveau Réalisme, and installation
art, they also presaged postwar transformations in exhibition practice, such as the curator
as auteur exhibition producer and the relocation to post-industrial sites. Above all, what
Director’s Theater anticipated in the history of art was a turn to the political implications
of participatory, embodied experiences, and a deep analysis of the spectator’s social
position. Against all odds, West German directors and designers salvaged Brechtian
aesthetics and didactic theater amid a booming economy and anti-communist
government. The afterlife they gave to epic theater offers a history and theory against
339
which to understand the turn to liveness in postwar galleries. As exhibition history
becomes ever more important to art history, the constant recycling of stage designs offers
a paradigm for the production of immersive artworks and exhibitions and their potential
to be called back into existence as re-makes and exhibition copies. From John Heartfield
to Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell within Germany, and from Niki de Saint-Phalle to Sol
LeWitt and Daniel Buren elsewhere in Europe, stage design was an episode in the careers
of artists who made politically engaged, anti-institutional, and reproducible works of art.
The creation and display of art within the theater was spatial and durational yet
dematerialized and contestatory. It was a testing ground for core artistic practices of the
postwar period.
340
Images to Chapter 4

FIG 1. “Ivan Puni,” Berlin, 1921 FIG 2. “Ambiente/Art,” Venice, 1976

FIG 3. Gilberto Zorio installing his work at the Kunsthalle Bern, 1969

341

FIG. 4. Exterior view, Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, documenta V, Kassel, 1972

FIG. 5. Interior view, Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, documenta V, Kassel, 1972
342

FIG 6. Installation view, Edward Kienholz, Roxy’s, 1961-1962

FIG 7. Edward Kienholz, Roxy’s, as reproduced in documenta IV catalogue, 1968
343

FIG 8. Installation view, Wolf Vostell, electronic dé-collage happening room, Venice
Biennale, 1968

FIG 9. Installation view, George Segal, documenta IV, Kassel, 1968
344

FIG 10. Installation view of Paul Thek, Arc, Pyramid at documenta V (1972), as
reproduced in As You Like It program booklet (1977)

FIG 11. As You Like It, West Berlin, 1977
345

FIG 12. Composite installation views, Achim Freyer, documenta VI, Kassel, 1977

346

FIG 13. Volksbühne, Berlin, 1943

FIG 14. Film still from Storming of the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, 1920
347

FIG 15. Faust I, Salzburg, 1933-1937

FIG 16. The Mother, West Berlin, 1970

348

FIG 17a-b. Karl-Ernst Herrmann, plan and elevation for Peer Gynt, 1971
349

FIG 18. Peter Stein, Peer Gynt, West Berlin, 1970

FIG 19. Peer Gynt, West Berlin, 1971
350
FIG 20. Peer Gynt, West Berlin, 1971

FIG 21. Faust, Stuttgart, 1977
351

FIG 22. Faust, Stuttgart, 1977

FIG 23. Faust, Paris, 1975

352

FIG 24. “Winterreise” from Hyperion, Olympiastadion, West Berlin, 1977

353

FIG 25. As You Like It, West Berlin, 1977

FIG 26. As You Like It, West Berlin, 1977

354

FIG 27. Hamlet, Bochum, 1977

FIG 28 a-b. Hamlet, Bochum, 1977

355

FIG 29. Hamlet, Bochum, 1977

FIG 30. Hamlet, Bochum, 1977 FIG 31. Wolf Vostell, no/nine-9-décollages, 1966

356

FIG 32. Hamlet, Bochum, 1977
357

FIG 33. The Coronation of Richard III, Bremen, 1978

FIG 34. The Coronation of Richard III, Bremen, 1978
358

FIG 35. The Coronation of Richard III, Bremen, 1978
359
BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS CONSULTED

Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Achim Freyer Archiv
Bertolt Brecht Archiv
Dokfonds Theater Archiv
Frank Patrick Steckel Archiv
Franz Gauker Sammlung
John Heartfield Archiv
Peter Zadek Archiv
Schaubühne Archiv

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.
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Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich
Archiv: Programmhefte, Theaterzettel, Kritiken
Bibliothek
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Harvard Art Museums
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Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart: Audiovisual Archiv, Plakatsammlung
Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg

Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
Sohm Archiv

Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln, Cologne
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Bibliothek
360
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