The history of European theatre is marked by traces of war. Since the beginnings of political theatre in ancient Greece war reappeared again and again as a subject for addressing commonly shared or vividly discussed understandings of how society should be constructed and interact with its own citizens as with the enemy. War exposes the given order of any society as threatened by collective violence and based on collective violence at the same time. Theatre serves as a place of creating, reaffirming and questioning ideas of society via a collaborative experience. The PhD-project undertakes it to elaborate how German and Israeli theatre after the Second World War deal with the double experience of war, which threatens a society with the violent destruction of its given order, and proposes and sets up a new social order in violence, to be the given one from now on. This search for the social and political meaning of theatrical presentations of war is intrinsically tied to the problem of how to present war as such or any historical war limited by the possibilities of theatre. The borders of (theatrical) imagination are at stake when it comes to war in theatre. The images have to be analysed which are presented to (re)present war on stage, to tell about war during a time span and at a place where war has to stay absent, an abyss behind theatre’s presentations of war. Therefore, as well the changes have to be analysed those images of war undergo in various re-presentations and reviews, when in differing political and social circumstances (nearly) the same images appear to speak about different wars. The potentiality of political theatre in modern democracies, though both societies in focus are formed by extremely different social terms and conditions, shall be looked on from the perspective of the most extreme form of collective social interaction – war. War can be understood as a possibility of political action carrying every conflict to extremes; thus, war appears as a subject of public discourse about the potentialities of political actions in a modern democracy challenging its constitution as no other subject does. The project’s aim is to analyse how this special challenge of war to a modern western society marks its war presentations in theatre understood as a part of the civilian public discourse of this society. Theatrical presentations of war might be able to tell about the potentiality of a political theatre, about what ‘political theatre’ could be. The project focuses on two theatre cultures within the field of European theatre after the Second World War: the German theatre and the Israeli theatre. Both share a European tradition of dramatic theatre, which during the second half of the 20th century takes a different course of developing old forms and creating new – often postdramatic – kinds of theatre, differently depending on each country’s cultural, social and artistic background. From the experience of the Second World War emerges in both countries a kind of implicit or explicit presence of this war in most presentations of war in public discourse as in the arts thereafter. Indeed, the strategies put forward to present war on stage after the Second World War are marked by having been the victims of the Holocaust on the one side, seeking to remember what had happened, or being the society of the perpetrators on the other side, often seeking to thrust aside the crimes committed. Nevertheless, a society’s current political situation influences the strategies of how to present war on stage, not only the Second World War but as well current wars. In analyses of a number of significant examples, taken from the vast amount of war plays and productions in German and Israeli theatre, a number of aspects of how war is and different wars are presented on stage will be looked on closer. From the one hand the presentation of the people involved in war – the soldiers and civilians, women and children, gender structures, and the... [ - ]

The history of European theatre is marked by traces of war. Since the beginnings of political... [ + ]