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The Geometry of Culture: Urban Space and Theatre Buildings in Twentieth-Century Berlin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Klaus van den Berg
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In her 1983 book, Semiotik des Theaters, Erika Fischer-Lichte referred to theatre as part of ‘die Geometrie der Kultur’, a network of relationships materialized in space that symbolizes cultural experience. The concept of the geometry of culture may enable us to show how, in an urban space, different strands of human activities find their expression in the outline of urban space. Lewis Mumford demonstrates in The City in History that political programmes, economic interests, and cultural concepts influence the city's organization as well as the functions which individual buildings take in the urban environment. Cultural historians and semioticians such as Mary Henderson, Monika Steinhauser, Michael Hays, and Marvin Carlson have adopted this perspective for their investigations of the history of theatre in various metropolitan areas. For example, Henderson studies the relationship between the theatres and the financial district in New York City; Michael Hays and Monika Steinhauser analyse particular urban monuments, such as the Lincoln Center in New York and the Paris Opera. Marvin Carlson analyses how theatre buildings have been integrated historically as public monuments in various urban settings. Within the context of such studies I will examine the spatial and aesthetic re-alignments that World War II forced upon the integration of theatre buildings in Berlin, taking as case studies four major theatres: the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the Deutsches Theater, the Schillertheater and the Volksbühne.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Spring 1991 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1991

References

Notes

1. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Semiotik des Theaters, Vol. 1 (Tubingen, 1983), p. 135.Google Scholar

2. Mumford, Lewis, The City in History (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

3. Steinhauser, Monika, Die Architektur der Pariser Oper (Munich, 1969)Google Scholar; Henderson, Mary, The City and the Theatre (New Jersey, 1973)Google Scholar; Hays, Michael, The Public and Performance: Essays in the History of French and German Theater, 1871–1900 (Ann Arbor, 1981)Google Scholar; Hays, Michael, ‘Lincoln Center and Some Other Cultural Paradigms’, Theater, 18, No. 1, Winter 1983, 25–29Google Scholar; Carlson, Marvin, ‘The Theatre as Civic Monument’, Theatre Journal, 40, No. 1, 03 1988, 12–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carlson, Marvin, The Place of Performance (Ithaca, 1989).Google Scholar

4. I am indebted for this critical perspective to Roland Barthes' essay ‘The Eiffel Tower’. Sontag, Susan, ed. A Barthes Reader (New York, 1982), 236–250.Google Scholar

5. Dreyfuss, Alfred, Deutsches Theater Berlin (Berlin, East, 1983), p. 138.Google Scholar

6. Wieck, Klaus, Kurfürstendamm und Champs-Elysées (Berlin, 1967), p. 32.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., p. 59.

8. The only major official or artistic connection with the theatres in the city centre came when Leopold Jessner, the director of the state theatre, took over the directorship in 1919 and brought Expressionism also to the Schillertheater.

9. Zielske, Harald, Deutsche Theaterbauten bis zum zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1971), p. 67Google Scholar. Max Littmann also designed the Prinzregententheater, Munich (1901) and the Künstlertheater, Munich (1908).

10. Krause, Rudolf, Die Berliner City (Berlin, 1958), p. 73.Google Scholar

11. Müller, Henning, Theater der Restauration (Berlin, East, 1981), pp. 173–174.Google Scholar

12. Merschmeier, Michael, ‘Kühn oder Tollkühn? Heribert Sasse, der Aufsteiger des Jahres’. Theater Heute, 8, 08 1983, p. 2.Google Scholar

13. Davies, Cecil, Theatre for the People: The Story of the Volksbühne (Manchester, 1977), p. 127.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., p. 138.

15. The former director of the Schaubühne Berlin, Peter Stein, may have felt this effect. He resigned from his post after the company had been relocated from a building in Kreuzberg to the representative Mendelsohn building on the upper Kurfürstendamm.