Post-War Traumas in Klaren's WOZZECK (1947)

Ca'Foscari International College, 2022

This research analyses the reception of Georg Büchner’s play “Woyzeck” in the 20th century and its adaptation in the musical theatre and Cinema. In particular, starting from the original text, the composition of the opera Wozzeck by Alban Berg and the film Woyzeck by Werner Herzog will be discussed, comparing the original play to the more recent adaptations. Moreover, the recent production of 2017 of the Wozzeck, with the scenography by William Kentridge will be taken into consideration as a contemporary declination of both Büchner’s text and Berg’s composition, demonstrating how alive and stimulating this play is in the artistic field and its everlasting relevance, thanks to its forerunning content and form.

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 1997

Polish Theatre Journal, 2018

The article is a recapitulation of Wojtek Ziemilski’s work, from his earliest intermedial productions (Map) up to the most recent productions, staged at publicly funded theatres (Come Together, One Gesture). An association with Brecht’s Lehrstücke provides a framework for bringing these formally disparate projects together. The author analyses Ziemilski’s pedagogic strategies, noting that his productions create a situation of transfer of knowledge not just with their form (conference, seminar, translation seminar, lecture, etc.), but also with their theme, which is often teaching or learning. The author observes that what differentiates Ziemilski from Brecht, making him into an undogmatic teacher is, first, the pivotal place unanswered questions take in his productions; and, second, the fact that he carries out the role of director as a mediator between various worldviews and paradigms.

German Life and Letters, 2018

The status of German High Culture and that of German National identity have historically been bound up with each other in a unique way setting the German National project apart in Europe as what Friedrich Meinecke described in 1907 as a Kulturnation.[2] With the appearance of his work Die deutsche Katastrophe in 1946,[3] he sought to revisit his discussion of Germany as a nation defined by his earlier conception of cultural value as a means to recover moral standing for a defeated and shamed nation, now defined by barbarism and folly by the Allied powers occupying it. In examining two films, Georg Klaren’s 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck,[4] and Karl-Heinz Stroux’s 1949 filming of Goethe’s Werther[5], released in the Tri-Zone just before the founding of the Federal Republic my paper will cast new light on this dilemma through the popular medium of Cinema. Both films feature the authors themselves as diegetic mediators for the adaptations of their work. I shall examine the choices of Büchner and Goethe as authors for the screen and look at what role they fulfil in a recuperative project of German cultural and national identity under Allied occupation.

2021

This first monograph on WWI dramatic literature closes one of the last research desiderata of the German literature on the First World War. The author opens up a hitherto unknown corpus of texts and identifies the most important discourses represented in these WWI plays. Furthermore, he embeds the discourses in contemporary public debates and identifies them in more famous dramatic works of the Weimar Republic. This allows the analysis of the Heimkehrerdramen of Toller, Brecht, and Horváth to focus on the representation of contemporary narratives that have so far been overlooked and embeds these plays in the context in which they were created. Previously, this was only the case for Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, which is also interpreted by the author in a newly established intertextual relationship with early WWI dramas. The approach this book takes not only provides new insights into WWI dramatic literature from 1914 to the end of the Weimar Republic, but also new points of departure for research in a number of literary and cultural studies fields.

German Life and Letters, 2018

The Polish Review, 2021

The Modern Language Review, 2000