Germany and the Euro-Crisis: The Bremer Shakespeare Company's Timon aus Athen

In this chapter, which I co-authored with Jeannie Farr, I consider the Bremer Shakespeare Company's production of Timon aus Athen (Timon of Athens) within the Globe to Globe Festival of the World Shakespeare Festival and Cultural Olympiad 2012.

We also produced the entry on Timon aus Athen for the official “Globe to Globe” blog for Shakespeare’s Globe, which you can read here.

Germany & the Cultural Olympiad

This work was part of a project I ran together with Dr Kate Elswit, and which you can hear more about in the podcast below. You can also read Dr Elswit’s research and performance work here, and her article on Pina Bausch here.

During the Cultural Olympiad, I also made a further podcast and wrote series of blogs which discussed the wider place of German-language culture within the Olympiad, and which you can listen to and read below.

In this chapter I consider the legacy of the myth of ‘unser Shakespeare’ (‘our Shakespeare’), and explore the extent to which the notion of Shakespeare as the German national poet retains any currency in the 20th and 21st centuries. In doing so, I question the extent to which the idea of a nationally specific Shakespeare is both challenged and sustained by his wider transnational circulation, and argue that new translation and performance practices continue to allow the myth of ‘unser Shakespeare’ to circulate across borders. The chapter opens by introducing the wider history of the appropriation of Shakespeare in Germany. Against this backdrop, it then identifies some of the mechanisms that have continued to support his ‘Germanness’ in the later 20th Century, arguing in particular that the longevity of the myth of ‘unser Shakespeare’ should be seen as the result of a novel ‘double translation’ of Shakespeare – both in terms of language, and in terms of performance tradition. Here attention is focused specifically on the figure of Brecht, and German productions within the Globe to Globe Festival of 2012. The chapter concludes by assessing the extent to which the myth of ‘unser Shakespeare’ continues to play a role in contemporary theatrical practice in Germany. Exploring the work of the director Thomas Ostermeier, it argues that the directorial persona of Ostermeier has become conflated with the myth of a radicalized German Shakespeare, allowing for and supporting the wider dissemination of this myth outside of Germany in the contemporary period.