Precarious Figurations : : Shylock on the German Stage, 1920–2010 / / Zeno Ackermann, Sabine Schülting.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Ackermann, Zeno,; Schülting, Sabine,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (X, 246 p.)

Precarious Figurations focuses on the reception of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or scholarly discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium, the book explores why the play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as a staging ground for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In particular, the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has come to be both a device in and a stumbling block for attempts to bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by the Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of Merchant, and in particular of the ways of doing and reading Shylock in the context of painful German, and German-Jewish, discourses of identity and remembrance, is designed to raise fundamental questions – questions concerning not only the staging of Jewishness, the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the difficulties of Holocaust remembrance, but also the general potentials and limitations of theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Preface -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1. Figuring Identity: Ruptures and Continuities from the Reinhardt Era to the Early Federal Republic (1905–1957) -- 2. Staging Remembrance: Refigurations on the West German Stage (1960–1990) -- 3. Inheriting a Classic: Configurations of Merchant in the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990) -- 4. After Remembrance? – Shylock in the Reunified Germany (1990–2010) -- 5. “Forced Companionability”: Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Stage Productions of The Merchant of Venice in Germany and Austria (1933–2010) -- Index