Worlds Elsewhere (17 page)

Longerich shrugged. ‘Goebbels realises it's impossible, it just can't be done. It's a vacuum. They have to do something.'

The solution was to stage classics. But even this wasn't as easy as it sounded. Goethe proved problematic (Hitler thought him ‘maudlin') and Schiller was troublesome because of his insurrectionary themes, most obviously
Wilhelm Tell,
whose hero was Swiss. (The play was taken off altogether in 1941, after a Swiss plot against Hitler.) Molière had been popular, but was banned after the invasion of France, alongside all French dramatists. Ancient Greek tragedy had the right kind of monumental purity, but was problematically southern European. Spanish Golden-Age drama was permissible, particularly after the cultural pact with Franco in 1939, but never took off. George Bernard Shaw was acceptable because he was perceived as anti-British, but was still alive, so there was the problem of royalties … So it went on. One of the few writers left was Shakespeare. Not only was he politically safe; everyone knew, of course, that he was German.

Proving this last fact beyond all doubt became of urgent importance. The Party issued a pamphlet called
Shakespeare: A Germanic Writer,
asserting that the nineteenth-century cult had been correct, and that Shakespeare's true home was now Germany. School curriculums emphasised the role of the ‘Nordic visionary' in freeing Goethe, Herder and Lessing from the tyranny of French neoclassicism. Schirach's Hitler Youth staged Shakespeare Weeks. (Invitations were sent to London in 1937, and politely refused.) Managers produced the plays in ever-greater numbers. In 1934, a total of 235 theatres opened seasons with Shakespeare; three years later, the figure was 320. In 1936, the regime boasted that there had been more Shakespeare productions in Germany that year than anywhere else in the world.

Even when ‘enemy dramatists' were banned after the outbreak of hostilities with Britain in 1939, Shakespeare stayed, now regarded – albeit after some soul-searching – as essential to the war effort.
Wille und Macht
magazine ran a special issue arguing that Shakespeare held his own in Germany ‘even in the face of the enemy'. On 23 April 1940, as the Wehrmacht were preparing their final assault on France, Germany's leading intellectual lights made sure to be in Weimar to hear the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft's president declare that ‘two centuries of German work on behalf of Shakespeare have given us the right to treasure the greatest dramatist of the German race'. When Munich's Kammerspiele agonised about a new
Hamlet,
they were assured by the propaganda ministry not to worry: for the purposes of paperwork, Shakespeare was officially German. It was rumoured the order came from Hitler himself.

Like every Nazi cultural policy – notably the Party's almost comically contradictory approach to jazz – this resulted in some tormented interpretational tangles. Given Nazi attempts to emulate the Roman empire, ‘heroic' plays such as
Julius Caesar
and
Coriolanus
were candidates for revival (despite uncomfortable echoes between Hitler and Caius Martius). So were the ‘Nordic tragedies'
Hamlet, King Lear
and
Macbeth,
the last of which was particularly popular, regarded as a ‘ballad' about a military hero overwhelmed by fate.

Comedies such as
Twelfth Night
and
The Winter's Tale
remained successful, as much for escapism as anything else, but
A Midsummer Night's Dream
had unhelpful associations with the Jewish composer Mendelssohn. The English histories were patently unsuitable, and effectively banned.
Antony and Cleopatra
was not an option, because, as one official primly put it, ‘a play in which a warlord leaves the battlefield to run after his mistress must be judged as particularly negative'.

But
Hamlet,
yet again, was in: a version starring the hugely famous actor (and favourite of Goering) Gustaf Gründgens opened at the Staatstheater in Berlin in 1936, and was a huge hit, reaching some 200 performances. With no discernible irony, one critic acclaimed Gründgens as ‘a Hamlet who knows precisely what he wants'. An entire Romantic tradition was overturned at a stroke.

The so-called ‘racial dramas' remained an obstinate problem. The Reichsdramaturg ruled that it was possible to put
Othello
on stage, so long as the hero was presented as an Arab nobleman rather than a ‘negroid' black African. But
The Merchant of Venice
caused tremors at the highest
level. On paper, no other play seemed so in tune with Nazi racial policies – had Hitler not declared in July 1942 that Shylock was a ‘timelessly valid characterisation of the Jew'? In theatres, though, the potentialities of Shakespeare's script proved dangerous and double-edged.

The unrepentantly anti-Semitic German actor Werner Krauss played Shylock in a notorious version in Vienna in 1943 – a few years after playing a series of identikit Jewish characters in the film
Jud Süss
– and presented what one reviewer described as ‘the pathological image of the typical eastern Jew in all his outer and inner uncleanness'. But other directors fought shy of the play, wary of raising sympathy for Shylock's predicament among audiences. Could it really be possible to stage his famous appeal for tolerance in a country where millions were on their way to concentration camps, if not already dead?

Many producers balked. Nor was this the only difficulty; the elopement of Shylock's daughter Jessica with the Christian Lorenzo was impossible to stage in a country whose race laws expressly forbade miscegenation.

Remarkably, Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser agonised for at least four years over the question, attempting to sell
The Merchant of Venice
as anti-Semitic propaganda when Shakespeare's text didn't quite make that possible. Someone offered to rewrite the ending so that Jessica turned her back on marriage. In the end Schlösser suggested to Goebbels an even more convoluted solution – doctoring the script to imply that Jessica was not of Jewish blood at all, but Shylock's Christian foster child. As for Shylock himself, that bothersome speech should simply be cut.

By summer 1944, it was obvious the regime was crumbling. Allied troops were about to breach Germany's borders. Theatres were closed. Yet, despite his ever-growing list of responsibilities, the Reichsminister's mind remained on finer things. That September, one of the last major propaganda projects to pass across his desk was a lavish film of
The Merchant of Venice,
with Werner Krauss once again in the lead and
directed by Veit Harlan, who had done
Jud Süss.
Goebbels greeted the idea eagerly, and pushed for production to start as soon as possible – one last chance for his cultural legacy to be assured. The scheme was patently delusional. But it said much about his sense of priorities that, even as defeat loomed, Goebbels couldn't let Shakespeare go.

I wondered about Longerich's view. Was this just frustrated ambition, or was there something deeper at work?

He sent a thoughtful stream of smoke in the direction of Königsplatz. ‘If you ask me, I think it's the idea of creating a kind of alternative world, a fantasy world. The racist imagination and political utopianism are not so different. Why is Hitler so obsessed by Wagner? Because it's fantasy.'

He ground the cigarette into the ashtray and drained his coffee briskly. ‘You want to go to a place and to see your fantasies becoming reality. That is theatre, yes?'

After three days spent chasing Nazi-shaped shadows, I was hopeful that Michael Thalheimer's production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
at the Residenztheater would lighten my mood. It had never been my favourite comedy – a school production where I played a fretful and poorly enunciated Philostrate was to blame for that – but I was sorely in need of some fairy dust. Perhaps the show could provide it.

I would have been wise to have done some homework. In the most brutal traditions of
Regietheater
(‘director's theatre'), Thalheimer was known for taking a scalpel to texts, the sharper the better. A version of
Faust,
staged in an empty black cube at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, presented Goethe's hero as a self-centred egomaniac, strumming an air guitar to Deep Purple's ‘Child in Time'. His production of Lessing's
Emilia Galotti
(1772) had boiled the tragedy down to an unremitting seventy-five minutes, the cast refusing to look each other in the eye throughout. ‘For me theatre is the last remaining public space where a discourse is dared … on the misery of the world, on the true state of humanity,' Thalheimer told an interviewer afterwards.

At the Residenztheater, there was misery aplenty on offer. The lighting was harsh and monochrome, the set made of steel pipes resembling the wall of a prison. Theseus and Hippolyta appeared to be in the terminal stages of an abusive relationship, him clawing her
breasts while she stared in mute horror into the wings. Hermia had almost certainly been raped by her father and was being pimped out to Demetrius; she and Lysander appeared to be in it entirely for the sex (which looked wretched). Puck, who spent most of the play half naked, had the belly of a darts player and the face of a crime boss. Even Nick Bottom, Peter Quince and co., usually a blessed piece of comic relief, were played as disgruntled union workers who looked as if they'd rather be manning a picket than mounting a piece of spineless bourgeois theatre.

Within ten minutes I had placed a series of private bets, which joylessly I watched myself win. Simulated rape? Check. Simulated anal rape? Check. Simulated blood? Check. Simulated semen? Check (a spume of beer sprayed across the stage). Full-frontal nudity, male and female? Check. Check, check, check. Not so much
Dream
as never-ending nightmare. For the first time I could recall, I yearned for there to be more fairies, perhaps even a burst of Mendelssohn.

In any case, my mind was elsewhere: still mouldering somewhere in the Third Reich. Had the Allies been so different, really? A few years after Goering's pet Gustaf Gründgens went on stage as
Hamlet
in Berlin, the British-born actor Maurice Evans – now forgotten, but a huge star at the time – had created a ‘GI
Hamlet'
and performed it at military bases in Hawaii. Heavily streamlined, it made the Prince (according to
Life
magazine) into a ‘rough-and-ready extrovert, delayed in avenging his father's murder more by force of circumstance than by his own pigeon liver'.

Around the same time, Fleet Air Arm lieutenant Laurence Olivier, spurred on by the Ministry of Information, remade
Henry V
as lavish, all-colour British propaganda in 1944. The movie was dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture' (a ‘spirit' that required swingeing cuts to the script, including Henry's order to his troops to kill their prisoners).

Less well-known was the top-secret British wartime plan, known as ‘Operation HK'. As a last-ditch measure in the event of invasion, Parliament would be evacuated to Stratford-upon-Avon and its members set up in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. No doubt the venue was chosen partly for practical reasons – a space of sufficient size in comparative rural safety, with plentiful hotel accommodation – but the idea of hunkering down in the home of the National Poet,
deep in the heart of England, evidently provided comfort to Britain's harried wartime civil servants.

Of course one could detach Shakespeare from the uses to which he had been put. One had to. Yet the thought that the works of Shakespeare, of all people, had become involved in all this I found both exhausting and depressing. He was the most humane of writers, the most even-handed, the most keenly sceptical of received ideas: he had an uncanny knack of finding glimmers of sympathy in the most unlikely circumstances. It was impossible to see
Measure for Measure
without wondering who was right: the idealistic woman who stands by her beliefs and refuses to sacrifice her virginity to save her brother's life, or the brother who puts her in that position? The law, or natural justice? Both, neither? One couldn't watch
The Merchant of Venice
without feeling for Shylock even as he drew the knife on Antonio. That was, of course, why the Nazis had such trouble staging him: he could never be as shallow and one-sided as they needed him to be. Still, I thought wearily, when it came to using Shakespeare as propaganda: a plague on both your houses.

On Sunday morning, the DSG assembled for the final time to bid farewell to each other and, at least temporarily, to Shakespeare. We had moved to the regal setting of the Altes Rathaus on Marienplatz, a white-stone, high-gabled building that looked as though it was made out of frosted gingerbread. Beneath the broad oak spans of the grand hall – a painstaking postwar facsimile of the fourteenth-century original – we sat in polite rows, listening to a financial journalist from the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
describe how Shakespeare had predicted the credit crunch. Listening to the rough translation whispered courteously by my neighbour, I tried to forget that this was also the hall where Goebbels had given the speech in November 1938 that led to Kristallnacht.

Music helped. In lieu of laying roses at Weimar's Shakespeare statue, the most ceremonious portion of the event was the performance by a local choir of Frank Martin's
Songs of Ariel.
Despite his English-sounding name, Martin was a Swiss composer who died in 1974, little-known outside the choral and operatic worlds, and often disregarded within them. He produced an impressive body of work, among them an anguished
Mass
for Double Choir
(1922–26), the
Petite Symphonie Concertante
(1946) and an intimidating number of theatre and opera scores.