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Shakespeare on the German Stage: Volume 2, The Twentieth Century (Vol 2)

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The Germans have a special affinity for Shakespeare to the point of having proclaimed him as one of their own. I have even heard that there are some Germans who think their Shakespeare is better than our Shakespeare. (Seriously, however, in the days leading to World War II some Germans did argue that a country that produced Shakespeare could not possibly be an enemy.) The Germans (with some justification) also take credit for rescuing Shakespeare's work from the hack adaptations in the years following his death. (One must remember that D'Avenant's adaptation of Macbeth, Nahum Tate's King Lear [with a happy ending] and Thomas Shadwell's The Tempest were the standard versions on the English stage for nearly a hundred years.) The German love affair with Shakespeare is an enduring one. There are hundreds of productions of Shakespeare in Germany every year. It has been so for virtually this entire century. In this fascinating book, William Hortmann shows how the political and social changes of the 20th Century were reflected in productions of Shakespeare on the German stage. It is amply illustrated with 125 photographs of the productions discussed in the text. There is also a special section by Maik Hamburger on theatre in Socialist East Germany that is one of the book's highlights. My only real criticism is that the book doesn't quite go all the way to the end of the century. It ends at 1995. I would still strongly recommend it to anyone who's interested in Shakespeare, Twentieth Century Germany or the history of the theatre. There is much food for thought here.