Worlds Elsewhere (16 page)

But I suspected there was something else going on:
unser
Shakespeare was very much alive and kicking. The strident militarism of the phrase may have made modern scholars blush (particularly in pacific, post-war Germany), but theatres operated as if it still applied. Only the plays of Schiller are more performed.

No fewer than three separate theatres were putting on Shakespeare performances during the Shakespeare-Tage. I had managed to get tickets for
A Midsummer Night's Dream
at the Residenztheater and
King Lear
at one of the most famous theatres in Germany, Munich's Kammerspiele. The new Lear was on everyone's lips. It was by the Dutch director Johan Simons, who even by the standards of contemporary German theatre had an insurrectionary reputation. Inge had seen it the night I arrived; when I asked her what she thought, she pursed her lips. ‘You'll see,' she said enigmatically.

As I took my seat inside the Kammerspiele's jewel-box art nouveau auditorium, there was something I couldn't put my finger on; something not quite right. The set looked unexceptional: a tent-like structure in black-and-white striped cloth, with what appeared to be real grass in front. It looked like an upmarket garden fete.

After a few minutes I worked out that the thing that wasn't right was the smell: thick and ripe, with distinct farmyard overtones. It reminded me of family caravanning holidays in north Wales. Why was I smelling it in central Munich? Could there be a very un-German problem with the drains?

No. The selling point of
König Lear
was that performing alongside the human cast was a troupe of live pigs, kept in an improvised pen downstage-left. Ears flopping, the pigs trundled amiably around, the size of large wheelbarrows, occasionally menacing the scenery. Every so often, a handler in rubber boots would top up a swill tray, which provoked an orgy of snuffling and munching.

The pigs certainly had excellent dramatic timing: as Lear was howling his way through the storm, one detached itself from the herd and embarked on what I can only describe as the porcine equivalent of a soliloquy, standing in full glare of the footlights and gazing coolly down the length of the auditorium.

The gist of the production was clear enough. This was
King Lear
as satire, with Ancient Britain as a farmyard in a muddy field, and a King – flabby and rasping – at the end of his rope. Cordelia wore spangly hotpants; Goneril and Regan, both frantic for their father's attention, were swaddled in shapeless smocks. In the hovel scene the farmyard
Konzept
seemed to make sense – both human and pig flesh, I can report, have the same radiant pink hue under stage lights – but elsewhere it reduced whatever grandeur the play contains to a state of brutish disquiet. The fight between Edgar and Edmund, which lasted for a grim five minutes, resembled a scuffle between drunks in a pub car park. Compared with the humans on stage – never mind us in the audience – the pigs, it seemed to me, had a pretty good deal.

Why
were
there pigs? I wondered if it'd be any clearer if one spoke German. Once the applause was done, I asked my neighbour. She shrugged, plainly baffled; that was contemporary German theatre for you.

I had an uncomfortable night's sleep in which abattoirs and shambles sticky with blood loomed large. By 8 a.m. I was outside my hotel.

I had arranged an appointment with Peter Longerich, a professor of German history who specialised in Holocaust studies and divided
his time between Munich and Royal Holloway in London. He had recently completed a biography of Goebbels, and was also involved in Munich's long-delayed project to build a museum documenting National Socialism. I hoped he might be able to answer the question that had been bothering me: why the Nazis had been so smitten by Shakespeare in the first place. Filleting the sonnets for references to breeding was one thing, but could one really turn the author of
The Merchant of Venice
and
Othello
into the poet laureate of the ‘master race'? Could
Hamlet,
the play so often co-opted as Germany's own, really coexist with the absolute will to power?

Out of nowhere, a black Alfa Romeo detached itself from the traffic and squealed to a halt next to the kerb. The door shot open.

Crouched inside was a rangy figure in a black leather jacket zipped against the morning chill, and dark, shoulder-length, thinning hair, worn in the manner of a German rock star of the late 1970s. Longerich. Over the gear-stick, a little contortedly, we shook hands.

His manner was sardonic and lightly amused; I reasoned it needed to be, if one spent much time in the company of Himmler and Goebbels.

As we swung into the line of traffic, I explained the object of my journey. He sent a spent cigarette cartwheeling out of the window.

‘You came to the right place. In Munich we have more Nazis than we know what to do with.'

It was here that the Party had its origins as a fringe group founded in 1919, one of a number of
Völkisch
extremist organisations that sprang up in the chaos following the Kaiser's abdication. Hitler became the fifty-fourth person to join what was then known as the German Workers' Party. He rapidly took control, changing its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and establishing a power base in the city. By November 1923 he had launched the so-called Beer-Hall Putsch, which culminated in a demonstration at the Feldherrnhalle (‘Field Marshal's Hall') in the centre of the city. When protestors exchanged fire with police, nineteen people were killed, fifteen of them brownshirts.

The putsch failed, but although the NSDAP was banned and Hitler imprisoned in Landsberg Fortress(where he occupied himself by writing
Mein Kampf
), Munich was crucial to the movement's rehabilitation. As soon as the ban was revoked in 1925, Bavarian businessmen and society hostesses replenished its coffers, while the city's unemployed working class filled the ranks of the Stormtroopers. Membership rocketed from
25,000 in 1925 to 180,000 in 1929. By 1930, following the Wall Street Crash, the Party was polling at 18 per cent nationally. Three years later, Hitler was in the Reichstag.

Munich had always been central to the myth, Longerich explained. In 1935 the city was bestowed with the title of
Hauptstadt der Bewegung
(‘Capital of the Movement'), and the NSDAP – eternally suspicious of cosmopolitan, liberal Berlin – retained its headquarters here, along with almost every Nazi organisation. We roared along the street that led towards the Feldherrnhalle, which the Nazis had sanctified as a memorial in front of which Munichers were required to give the Nazi salute (with an unlooked-for effect on pedestrian flow; the detour to avoid it became known as the
Drückebergergasse
or ‘Dodgers' Alley').

Longerich parked on the edge of Königsplatz. We walked the rest on foot. Some of the earliest Nazi rallies and book-burnings had been held here in 1935, the same year that the corpses of the brownshirts killed in 1923 were reburied in so-called Temples of Honour. The square was expanded into a vast parade ground, equipped with a state-of-the-art lighting system for rallies and military manoeuvres.

Königsplatz was now covered in grass, and the Temples of Honour were long gone, dynamited by the US Army in 1945, but the plinths in the distance remained, partially shrouded beneath a dark tangle of brambles and weeds. Sombre grey buildings, sombre grey sky; the place had a desolate and wind-nagged air, even on a gentle spring morning like this. It was all too easy to project the grainy black-and-white photographs in the history books on to the scene in front of me: thousands upon thousands of ink-black Stormtroopers standing to crisp attention, swastikas snapping in the breeze.

The Documentation Centre was a sorry story, Longerich explained, subject to endless postwar wranglings about the meaning of the past. After more than a decade of impassioned in-fighting, the project had come close to falling through, and the arguments about what should go inside had still not finally been settled.

He gestured to a cube-like structure swathed in scaffolding and white protective panels, on the site of what had been NSDAP headquarters: at least the builders had begun.

‘One day, you know, we might even get it finished.'

Over coffee and Danishes, Longerich and I debated how William Shakespeare had got himself mixed up in all this.

Kultur
and
Kulturpolitik
had always been vital to the Nazi movement, in Munich most especially: in 1933 Hitler declared the city ‘Capital of German Art', and it was here in 1937, inside an improvised space in the Hofgarten, that the notorious exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art' had been held.

Moreover, the Nazis had a taste, and something of a talent, for drama. The renovations to Königsplatz transformed what had been a humdrum city square into a site for grandiose, semi-mystical ceremonies that could be replayed via newsreels across the world. Torchlit processions and military march-pasts were crafted with a director's eye, not a detail or uniform out of place. One thinks inevitably of the 1936 Olympics, which became a spectacle of fascist power on the largest stage the world could offer, all captured for cinematic posterity by Leni Riefenstahl.

Theatre was also a private obsession. Hitler's reverence for Wagner and the more bombastic bits of Beethoven was well recorded, but I hadn't known about his interest – fed by the intellectual vanity of an intelligent but poorly educated man – in drama. His own theatrics during speeches were rehearsed with actorly precision, and it was a fascination encouraged by his friendship with Joseph Goebbels, a genuinely cultured man who had a doctorate in nineteenth-century German drama and a lifelong passion for high art. Together the two made theatre trips, recorded in exhaustive detail in Goebbels's thirty-one volumes of diaries. Shakespeare was installed as a favourite author. Though I had a hard time believing that Hitler was ever much of an expert, the historian Timothy Ryback has located leather-bound translations of the plays in the Führer's private library, and Hitler was given to quoting lines from
Hamlet
and
Julius Caesar,
particularly when menacing political opponents. In a sketchbook from 1926 he had roughed out designs for a scene in act one of
Julius Caesar,
the forum where Caesar is murdered in cold blood.

Goebbels's own passion, Longerich explained, ran much deeper. At Heidelberg university he had studied with the most famous Shakespearian of the age, Friedrich Gundolf, whose
Shakespeare und der Deutsche Geist
of 1911 (‘Shakespeare and the German Soul') became the canonical expression of
unser
Shakespeare (a bleak irony: Gundolf was Jewish). Goebbels had also spent the early 1920s attempting to forge a career as a writer, composing verse plays – only one of which
was ever staged – and writing an expressionist novel heavily influenced by Goethe's
Werther.

As propaganda chief, Goebbels maintained an iron grip on the news agenda and the Party's image, and he quickly set up a so-called ‘Chamber of Culture' with draconian powers extending across the press, radio, film, publishing, music, visual arts and theatre. Goebbels used this not simply to regulate what was available for public consumption, but to indulge his own predilections and whims. Shakespeare was one: after seeing
Coriolanus
in 1937, Goebbels exclaimed that the playwright was ‘more relevant and modern than all the moderns. What a huge genius! How he towers over Schiller!'

There was pure politics behind this, but surely something more: the excitable compulsion of the artist manqué. What Goebbels had so conspicuously failed to achieve with his own art he could accomplish as Reichsminister.

‘Theatre genuinely meant a lot to him,' said Longerich. ‘If you read the diaries it's clear that he's emotionally touched and driven by the experience. I don't think it's cold-blooded propaganda. He really is an enthusiast.'

‘Politics had become the drama of the people,' Goebbels wrote, and it was a mantra he lived. He set up a number of ‘Reich theatres' directly under his remit, involving himself in almost every aspect of their work, and appointed Rainer Schlösser, the journalist and DSG member from Weimar, to the new position of
Reichsdramaturg.
Fond of issuing unprompted director's notes (in 1936, he gave advice on a new production of Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde
at the Deutsche Oper, which the production team scrambled to put into effect), Goebbels also acted as munificent patron. Perhaps a quarter of the ministry's budget went on theatre, far in excess of its political value, and more than the amount it spent on straight propaganda. Between 1933 and 1942, audiences for German theatre roughly doubled.

The difficulty was what to put on stage. ‘Degenerate' or left-wing scripts from the 1920s were obviously out; so too were works by playwrights who had any hint of Jewish ancestry – an alarming number. Goebbels's initial intention had been to mould a new
Völkisch
culture that could rival achievements in arms production or on the sporting field, but the practicalities defeated the ministry, particularly as so many artists had fled overseas. Goebbels had a brief passion for commissioning
Thingspiele,
vast outdoor theatre events – part rally,
part pseudo-Nordic cult ceremony – but the logistical challenges of building 4,000 outdoor arenas proved impossible, and audiences were mystifyingly resistant. Schemes to commission symphonies and films on National Socialist themes came to little. At a talk for activists in 1935, Goebbels conceded that it was possible to ‘build autobahns, revive the economy, create a new army,' but not ‘manufacture new dramatists'. Goering admitted that it was ‘easier to make an artist into a National Socialist than the other way around'.

As war crept up it became difficult to commission new plays anyway. It was a headache: a huge number of German theatres, and an ever-shrinking repertoire.