Laura Ginters

Es lebe die Revolution? Danton’s Tod on Stage in the Twenty-First Century

In Act ii, Scene 2 of Danton’s Tod the Zweiter Herr urges his companion: ‘Aber gehn Sie ins Theater, ich rat es Ihnen!’2 I take this as my starting point for this chapter. One hundred and eighty years after his death, Büchner lives on – vibrantly, politically, chaotically, joyfully and despondently – because of the theatre. It is his plays in production which allow us to respond with a contemporary sensibility to Büchner’s works, and for them, also, to work on us, as individuals and as members of society, in ways that the text alone on the page cannot do. In this context Danton’s Tod has, since its first production in 1902, occupied a special role in the German-speaking theatre, particularly in relation to the ways in which contemporary revolution and other political action are perceived and portrayed. In the following chapter I will focus on two recent productions of the play and what they tell us about Büchner and revolution today. For more than two hundred years there has been a strong connection between the theatre and the state in Germany. In 1784 Schiller even proposed that one would follow from the other, pronouncing: ‘[w]enn wir es erlebten, eine Nationalbühne zu haben, so würden wir auch eine Nation.’3 The stage, then, has long been a place where issues of national interest could be presented and debated. Indeed, some have argued that the stage became perhaps the only arena in Germany where political resistance and revolution could take place. As I have detailed elsewhere, Danton’s Tod, with its ambivalent revolutionary theme, offers particularly rich possibilities for German theatre-makers.4 But can we still say ‘es lebe die Revolution’? While the earlier production history 1 ‘Long live the Revolution’. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 2 ma, p. 95, tmw, p. 38: ‘But go to the theatre – take my advice’. 3 Friedrich Schiller, Werke, Nationalausgabe, 43 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–2006), vol. 20, p. 99. ‘If we could have a national theatre, then we would also have a nation.’ 4 See for example Laura Ginters, ‘History and Her Story: Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod on Page and Stage’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2000); and Laura Ginters, ‘“Wir sind das Volk!” How a Failed Revolutionary Wrote About the French Revolution – and Thereby Helped Cause One 154 Years Later’, in Theatre in the Berlin Republic. German Drama Since Reunification, ed. by Denise Varney (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 165–98.