Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment

Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment

by Minou Arjomand (Author)

Synopsis

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term show trials suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era's great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages?

In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 256
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 09 Oct 2018

ISBN 10: 0231184883
ISBN 13: 9780231184885

Media Reviews
In crystal-clear prose, Staged examines the unique relation between political thought and theater in German and German-American theater from the 1920s to the 1970s, one born from the historical experience of Nazism, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. I was struck by how much we can learn from this painful period of German and German-American theater and political thought. The book is very timely indeed.--Martin Puchner, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Author Bio
Minou Arjomand is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.