Complicity and Conflict: GDR Theatre Censorship, 1961-1990

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Theatre is intrinsically unstable: it provides no fixed product, communicates live with its audience, and therefore presents particular challenges to both censors and researchers. This may explain why, eighteen years after the GDR's demise, scholarship on theatre censorship lags behind equivalent publications on literature. My monograph will offer the first detailed investigation of how GDR theatre censorship developed between 1961 and 1990, how it was practised in different regions, and how it affected different genres, from classical tragedy through to contemporary drama.Since 1990, academics (e.g. Darnton, 1995) have emphasized the need to replace Cold War value judgements with a more nuanced understanding of censorship as a process of negotiation. Yet most recent publications on GDR performance come from practitioners with a vested interest in maintaining the myth of theatre as a centre of resistance to the regime, whether through memoirs, interviews, or in-house theatre publications. By focusing on high-profile disputes, even academic studies (e.g. Braun, 1995) tend to perpetuate the notion that conflict between artists and officials was the norm. I challenge these assumptions by examining cases with different outcomes, ranging from production bans, through uneasy compromises, to stagings welcomed by officials. I explore how theatre practitioners were involved in censorship and show that conflicts ran along multiple lines, within and between Party and state institutions, and within theatres themselves. The historical scope of my project allows me to compare theatre practitioners' roles in different disputes, where loyalties were often decided case by case.The monograph will break new ground by exploring how the ruling Party's denial of censorship affected the regulation of theatre and the decisions made by cultural officials. This denial was rooted in the regime's desire to distance itself from the practices of the Third Reich and to project a democratic image during its confrontation with the Federal Republic. As censorship did not officially exist, bureaucrats could hold theatre practitioners accountable for productions that had already passed through pre-performance controls. This apparent devolution of responsibility exposed theatre practitioners to considerable risks, encouraging them to practise self-censorship. Theatre practitioners faced all the controls of censorship without any of the guarantees, explaining why GDR dramatists (unlike novelists and poets) campaigned in 1987 for censorship's legalization. This project is based on extensive research in federal and regional state archives, theatre archives, and the Stasi archives, providing the basis for historical, cultural and performance analysis. The evidence includes the records of the central and regional state and Party authorities, ranging from policy documents and notes of telephone conversations to assessments of theatres, scripts and productions; performance-related material such as scripts, rehearsal notes, audiovisual recordings, set designs, and minutes of post-show discussions; and the Stasi files. I have also interviewed directors, actors, critics and former SED officials.'Complicity and Conflict' will make a substantial contribution to scholarship across several fields: censorship, theatre studies, literary criticism, and historical accounts of the GDR and other Socialist regimes. Its historical and geographical scope sets it apart from the few existing discussions of theatre censorship (Braun, 1995; Baker, 2007), and the geographical range of its detailed case studies is unusual even for scholarship on the GDR: it compares censorship in East Berlin with the practice in Dresden, Schwerin, Leipzig, Halle and Neubrandenburg. Although the GDR has traditionally been seen as a heavily centralized state, the substantial regional variations in theatre censorship point to a diversity in its political culture that has yet to be acknowledged.