Hey, there! I'm Mike Rugnetta. This is Crash Course Theatre, and today,
we're feeling stressed, but also romantic
and sometimes classical. It's an emotional
whatever mileage is in German because we're exploring the German theatre of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
when playwrights rebelled against the enlightenment and bourgeois society
by writing some really dark plays.
We'll explore the enduring conflict between intellect and emotion, and between society and the individual .
We'll meet a funny little guy in a hat named Hanswurst.
Lights up.
Germany didn't establish a theatre of its own until late.
That's probably because Germany itself wasn't
really established until late.
The 30 years war ended in 1648, leaving Germany a mess
of three hundred separate provinces and city states.
Most of them were devastated. It wasn't until the mid 1800
that the nation was finally unified.
In the meantime, German nobles who wanted theatre imported
it from France and Italy. Common people had to make do with bare grounds stuff.
Some of that stuff was provided by English actors.
English plays weren't so popular.
With Frederic Degrey calling Shakespear plays:
Oof! Sorry, Canada. Not so great, Frederic, if you ask me.
But travelling English clowns were a hit!
especially when they developed German characters like Starkfish[?] and Pickle Herring.
hehe... Pickle Herring...
Eventually Germany developed its own stock clown:
HANSWURST or John Sausage (>o>)
A Bavarian fool who worn a green hat and drank a lot of beer.
And that was pretty much the highest achievement of German theatre until
the mid 18th century. The first serious German troop, the [?], showed how serious they were
by barbecuing Hanswurst in effigy.
But then they stopped making money
so they had to bring Hanswurst's plays back.
What can you say? The people wanted more John Sausage.
German's first serious playwright was G.E. Lessing who was also the world's first dramaturg
In the mid 18th century, inspired by English playwrights, he wrote bourgeois comedies and tragedies about middle class German Characters.
These were considered amazingly realistic, and finally attracted middle class audience to the theatre..
Around this time, some Germany first permanent theatres were build, which gave Lessing and other German playwrights a place to show their stuff like:
Like sentimentalism in England. Lessing's work reflected the good old enlightenment idea
that people are mostly good and just need a little moral hand-holding.
The playwrights who came after him were like: "Uh... No."
They looked around at the ravages of poverty and crime
and they argued that maybe people and society weren't so great after all.
I mean... we've all been there, right?
The movement they've created was called:
"Sturm Und Drang" or "Storm and Stress"
named for a 1776 play by Friedrich M. Klinger
that is nominally set during the American Revolution even though none of the characters are American.
It's a pretty silly play about family grudges and concealed identities,
but somewhere in there is an argument for passionate individualism,
and that's what "Sturm Und Drang" is all about.
Sort of... In fact, it's hard to tell exactly what "Sturm Und Drang" is about
because as aesthetic movements go, this one wasn't the most coherent.
The men who let it sort of agreed on what they were against: modern life, rationalism,
but not really on what they were for, so some plays reject the unities some don't.
Some of them are really emotional, but some aren't.
There's an uncomfortable amount of rape and child murder, but not enough to like build a movement around.
Not that you'd want to.
Writers such as Friedrich Schiller and Johann Von Wolfgang Goethe were fans of this movement.
Goethe wrote one of Sturm Und Drang most famous plays, Götz von Berlichingen, which was so long and so spectacular
that it was pretty much unstageable.
Schiller had a scandalous success with The Robbers, which got him temporarily banned from play-writing.
In The Robbers, an outlaw is the true hero, and it's wealthy brother who is thriving in a corrupt society who is the villain.
Both Schiller and Goethe later rejected Strum Und Drang in favor what came to be known as Weimar classicism.
Goethe was inspired by a trip to Italy
which convinced him that maybe classical models weren't so bad?
Schiller took a decade off play-writing to read history and came to the same conclusion.
Weimar classicism was a throwback to Enlightement theatre,
with its faith in reason and order.
Instead of using French neoclassicism as its model, though,
it looked all the way back to the Greeks and Romans.
Weimar classicists wanted to make a theatre so galvanizing, extraordinary, and exquisitely beautiful that it would reveal some kind of greater truth.
For 26 years, Goethe also took over the actual Weimar court theatre in Weimar, Germany.
Even though Goethe's plays and the plays of his admired contemporaries formed only a small part of the repertory there.
He advanced the theatre in other ways by training his actors in verse speaking and more naturalistic acting.
And by rejecting haphazard blocking in favor of more specific, more painterly tableaus.
The German movement that followed Sturm Und Drang and spread across Europe in the early years of the 19th century was Romanticism.
As we discussed in Crash Course: Literature, Romanticism doesn't have a lot to do with the shirtless guy on the book cover kind of romance...
Instead it was a profound reaction against enlightenment certainties
and the social transformation wrought by the industrial revolution.
Romanticism emphasized emotions over intellect, instinct over reason, and nature over culture.
Romantics drew on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that humans are at their best in a state of nature
And Immanuel Kant who wrote that we understand the world only through subjective experience
Romantics believed that humans are caught between an earthly existence and a higher spiritual existence.
Nature moves us closer to that higher existence, and so can art, especially if a romantic genius is making that art.
In fact, Playwright Frederic Schiller theorized that the only way people can reconcile the confusion between sensuality and reason and body and mind
is through art and the impulse of play.
Romantic playwrights weren't interested in realism.
Their plays mostly took place in an idealized past,
an imagined future or a far off locale.
Anywhere that, as composer Richard Wagner wrote, would allow audiences from
The disgusting and disheartening burden of this world of lying and fraud and hypocrisy and legalized murder."
Maybe, worth noting Richard Wagner was also a noted anti-Semite.
Romantics favored Shakespearean over neoclassical models and tend to avoid hard and fast rules about unities
in their desire to represent passion and emotions.
Many playwrights doubted that their plays could ever be successfully produced
so they wrote closet dramas that were staged only in the minds of their readers.
Romantics playwrights, worth noting, include Ludwig Tieck who helped with new translation of Shakespeare and staged Shakespeare's plays in the Elizabethan Style.
He also wrote his own plays based on folks and fairy tales.
Then there was Heinrich von Kleistwas who [?] dropped out of school and wrote some plays including the dream-like Prince of Homburg.
He wanted to have a romantic death.
And after a couple of tries, he convinced a woman to enter into a suicide-pack with him.
There was also Georg Büchner who wrote Danton's Death, a tragedy of the French Revolution,
and the wild fragmentary, Woyzeck, which is like a bourgeois tragedy spiked with psychedelic before you die of typhus.
I personally have been involved in 3 productions of that one.
To illustrate some of these movements, we're going to look at a play that has elements of
Sturm Und Drang, Weimar classicism, Romanticism, and probably some other stuff, too because it's very long.
That play is Goethe's Faust, arguably the greatest work of German dramatic literature.
We're only going to at the first part of it which was published in 1808.
Like Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Goethe's Faust is based on an ancient German puppet play
about a scholar who sells his soul to the demon, Mephistopheles in return for tenure-
I mean POWER. In return for power.
But it departs from the legend and from Marlowe in pretty significant ways.
Some of them involving witches and beer. Help us out Thought Bubble!
God bet Mephistopheles that he can't corrupt God's favorite professor, Faust.
This dude is making himself miserable by striving for divine knowledge. Mephistopheles is all "Corrupting is what I do best!"
So Meph. goes down to earth, taking the form of sinister poodle, follows Faust home to his study where makes Faust a deal.
If Faust pledges to serve Mephistopheles in hell and Mephistopheles will serve Faust here on Earth.
Since Faust isn't one of those guys who signs in blood without reading the fine print,
he stipulates that Mephistopheles can only have his soul
if he enjoys a moment of perfect happiness,
and wishes that moment - "Augenblich" in German - would last forever.
Mephistopheles agrees. How does Faust celebrate his new found power?
First, Mephistopheles doing the corrupting thing takes him out for celebratory beer and pulls a bunch pranks on some of the other drunks which Faust does not find funny.
Then he takes Faust to a witcher shop[?]and gives him a potion to make him look young and hot.
While still hot, he convinces Gretchen, an innocent country girl to sleep with him, helping Gretchen accidentally kill her mother along the way.
Faust gets Gretchen pregnant, deserts her, and - just to make things that much worse -
kills her bother... I mean, the literal devil is involved here, after all.
Then Faust goes out to a party at a witches's sabbath. Gretchen loses her mind, drowns her baby, and is sentenced to death.
Thank you, Thought Bubble! <3
That was HORRIBLE.
Feeling at least a little regretful, Faust leaves the witch orgy and goes to Gretchen's cell to try to talk her into a prison break,
but Gretchen will not go with him, and instead commends her soul to god.
As Faust and Mephistopheles leaves, a voice from heaven announces that Gretchen's soul is saved, which for part 1 at least is sort of a surprised happy ending?
I guess...?
We can see the evident of the Sturm Und Drang movement in Faust's internal torment and in Gretchen's infanticide.
There's recognizable Romanticism in the radical individualism of a genius hero who resists taking a complacent role in a society
and instead thrives for knowledge, power and connection to a higher spiritual realm... [deep breaths...]
before meeting a tragic death (obviously).
We can also see a deep Weimar classicism in Faust's desire for a moment of beauty so profound and transformative that it's worth losing his soul over.
Don't worry. Faust doesn't actually lose his soul though. In the second part after a few decades of adventures, he gets the better of the devil mostly because of a squabble over verb tense.
Grammar is important people! Join us next time when we'll cheer
heroes and boo villains,
and Yorick will probably get himself tied to railroad tracks because we're going to studying melodrama.
And it is NOT mellow at all...
but until then...
Curtain!
Crash Course: Theatre is produced in PBS Digital Studios.
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