| Much has been written about Greco-Roman myth interpretations in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a form of resistance against a totalitarian regime or, alternatively, as a redeployment of cultural icons in service of nationalism and ideology. While both of these approaches go to motive, neither accommodates a discussion of how these "classical" materials came to be pressed into service and what this conscription tells us about cultural identity in the GDR. Recalling that the theater of the GDR, both in its early days and in its later forms, was preoccupied with self-legitimization as a cultural arm of the socialist state, both of the burgeoning "nation" and of its incipient "culture," the new mythopoeism provides for an identifiable cultural matrix: on the one hand, it categorically asserts German cultural autonomy against Marxist-Leninist, over-determined historiography, and, on the other, presents expressive rituals fueled by contemporary antagonisms that belie this very project of continuity in the politically assailed paradigms of German cultural identity.;In the period under scrutiny, three major GDR playwrights-Peter Hacks, Heiner Muller, and Stefan Schutz--pen exceptional and distinctive interpretations of "traditional" or "classical" Greek dramaturgy and in doing so make prominent contributions to what can only be described as a "surge" of mythopoeism on stages across the GDR. My examination of the portrayal of ritual in mythopoeism by Hacks, Muller, and Schutz suggests that a continuity exists between their interpretations of Greek myths and issues confronting collective psychology in the GDR, particularly with regard to questions of anamnesis. While this study focuses on ancient Greek mythological topoi and tropes in the theater of the GDR from approximately the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, the trajectory of this study as a whole is to document and critique deeper issues of cultural authority, "memory engineering," and theatricalization in East Germany as they continue into narrative texts of the 1980s and early 1990s. |
