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This collection of articles by both German literature specialists and German theater experts grew out of the Comparative Drama Conference held annually between February and March from 1977 to 1999 in Gainesville, Florida. At the center of the contributors' work is the productive tension between the literary and the performance aspects of German drama and theater. At the same time, the reception is truly American, since the German playwrights, directors, theorists, and dramatists discussed have gone through creative filters in the researching, performing, and teaching of German drama and theater on various campuses across the United States during the last third of the twentieth century.
Public demand for comedy has always been high in the German-speaking countries, but the number of comic dramas that have survived is relatively small. Those which are still read or regularly performed all have a serious purpose, and this collection of fourteen essays on the most distinguished of them shows how laughter can be exploited to treat personal, moral, and social problems in a way that would not be possible in tragedy. The texts range from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century, and no fewer than half of them are by Austrian writers. The contributors show how these plays are often subversive, regularly arousing an uncomfortable, self-challenging laughter, and how they treat such widely ranging subjects as language and communication, the complications of the sex drive, the inflexibility of the Prussian mind, and the behaviour of Austrian celebrities during the Third Reich. The essays are all written by specialists in the field and were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.
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This work introduces us, by means of a series of vignettes, to the changes, large and small, that have taken place in Germany since the dismantling of the Wall. The author argues that the real fear about the new Germany is not the rise of neo-Nazism, but of a cult of righteousness, with its concomitant mistrust of foreigners and especially the threat of the creation of a moral vacuum for a nation so intent on forgetting the ghosts that haunt its past.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. Today his works appear as prototypes of the later developed bourgeois German drama. "Miss Sara Sampson" and "Emilia Galotti" are seen as the first bourgeois tragedies, "Minna von Barnhelm" as the model for many classic German comedies.