Christin Krüger, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"
Doctoral Research Project

The theatre and the unsettled everyday life of actors are among the earliest subjects of novelistic literature. Particularly in the German-speaking area, numerous novels published from 1800 until far into the twentieth century depicted the lives and work of theatre artists. Krüger's doctoral project examines the popularity of theatre novels during their last boom between 1900 and 1945 with a special focus on the artistic and publishing strategies as well as the evaluation processes through which the genre developed during a period of heightened social tensions and media upheaval.

Theatre novels in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic responded to the work of some of the most influential theatre makers of the twentieth century, Max Reinhardt and Bertolt Brecht being cases in point. Moreover, contrary to what literary criticism in Germany around 1900 suggested, theatre as a literary setting not only continued to establish itself in the entertainment market, but was also embraced as a medium of reflection outside popular culture. Theatre novels were published by authors who are now almost forgotten (e.g., Carry Brachvogel, Lili Grün, Georg Hirschfeld, Berthold Viertel and Otto Zarek) and by writers who remain canonical to this day (e.g., Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich Mann and Arthur Schnitzler). Besides tracing the literary and non-literary influences that have contributed to the enormous spread of this literary phenomenon, the project is dedicated to (re)readings beyond the canon, offering a re-evaluation of a genre that was highly popular in the fin de siècle and the Weimar Republic, but is hardly remembered today.

        

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ortlieb, Prof. Dr. Michael Gamper (both Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020)