JELAVICH, Peter Charles. "Theater in Munich 1890-1914 : A Study in the Social Origins of Modernist Culture"

MUHSAM, Erich (1878-1934). Écrivain, auteur dramatique et poète allemandart: theater* bibliographie

Princeton University. Ph. D., 1982.
This thesis seeks to examine the political, social, and economic factors that led to the rise of modernist theater in Munich during the years 1890-1914. An extensive examination of newspapers, periodicals, and
archival sources (police records, governmental correspondence, personal papers) reveals that dramatists and producers of the turn of the century faced two major problems.
On the one hand, censorship became more stringent as Bavaria’s liberal regime made concessions to the culturally conservative Catholic Center party, which gained increasing power in the prewar years. On the other hand, writers and producers of serious drama had difficulty attracting an audience among the broad middle-class public that patronized farce and vaudeville. The diverse forms of modernist theater were attempts to come to terms with censorship and to attract an audience under these unfavorable conditions.

After the socially critical naturalist movement of the early 1890s provoked hostile responses from the liberal state, the Catholic Church, the Social Democratic Party, and the broad middle-class public, many playwrights and producers abandoned social concern and created aestheticist dramas of mood and intimate theaters that catered to a limited sector of the educated bourgeoisie.
In contrast, other dramatists—most notably Frank Wedekind and members of the cabaret movement (1901-1903)-continued to compose socially critical works, but employed conventions of vaudeville and popular performance in order to enhance their theatrical appeal to the audience.
This introduction of popular theatrics to elite stages eventually revitalized the presentation of serious drama, as exemplified by the productions and scenarios designed for the Munich Kunstlertheater by
Georg Fuchs, Max Reinhardt, and Vassily Kandinsky (1908-1914). At the same time that this "revolution of the theater" was taking place, the collapse of liberalism in the face of Catholic victories led to a
political polarization of playwrights and directors.

Whereas Erich Muhsam engaged in anarchist activism, Georg Fuchs developed a protofascist conception of theater as a tool for forging a homogenous racial community. Consequently, both the political polarization and the theatrical experimentation that were to characterize Weimar culture were already well developed by 1914.
DAI, VOL. 42-09A, Page 4113