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Staging Global Theatre History in the Museum: Carl Niessen and the Draft of the Reichstheaterinstitut (1943)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2020
Abstract
The theatre collection of Carl Niessen (1890–1969), professor of theatre studies in Cologne, contains a draft of a comprehensive research institution for theatre studies (Reichstheaterinstitut) from 1943. This draft consists of a blueprint of a museum of global theatre history and a written outline. In the blueprint, the objects and documents were presented in a sequential narrative so that visitors would be able to explore a global theatre history through the embodied practice of walking through a setting of interrelated theatre concepts. Drawing on Diana Taylor's distinction between the archive and the repertoire, I argue that, although never realized as planned, this blueprint conceptualized Niessen's ideas of how to think about, exhibit, present and experience theatre history through material traces, as an anthropological constant – a conditio humana varying in time and space.
- Type
- Dossier–Theatrical Vestiges: Material Remains and Theatre Historiography
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2020
References
NOTES
1 As I elaborate in my dissertation on Niessen and the early days of theatre studies in Cologne, Niessen was a conservative, völkisch scholar who nevertheless had a complex and ambivalent view on the Nazi regime. On the one hand, he tried to use the new power structures to his advantage; on the other hand, he was unwilling to completely put himself and his research into commission of the Nazis. Cf. Nora Probst, Objekte, die die Welt bedeuten: Carl Niessen und der Denkraum der Theaterwissenschaft (in preparation for publication). See also Marx, Peter W., ‘Interpretations: The Interpretation of Theatre’, in Marx, Peter W., ed., A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 135–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 156; and Strobl, Gerwin, The Swastika and the Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 166 fGoogle Scholar. Since I approach Niessen's ambivalent role during the Nazi regime in my dissertation in detail, this essay will only marginally be concerned with the political implications of the Reichstheaterinstitut.
2 Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Carl Niessen, ‘Aufgaben der Theaterwissenschaft, Teil 2’, Kölnische Zeitung, 27 August 1926.
4 Balme, Christopher, ‘Carl Niessen: Handbuch der Theater-Wissenschaft (Relektüre)’, Forum Modernes Theater, 24, 2 (2009), pp. 183–9Google Scholar, here p. 187.
5 Nora Probst, ‘“The Alleged Gap between Academia and Art”: Julius Lips, Carl Niessen and the Masks of Men (1931/32)’, in Anna Brus, Lucia Halder and Clara Himmelheber, eds., ‘Der Wilde schlägt zurück’: Kolonialzeitliche Europäerdarstellungen der Sammlung Lips/‘The Savage Hits Back’: Colonial-Era Depictions of Europeans in the Lips Collection (Berlin: Reimer, in preparation for publication).
6 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 19.
7 Carl Niessen, ‘Ein Reichsinstitut für Theaterforschung verbunden mit dem Reichstheaterarchiv und Reichstheatermuseum’ (manuscript, Cologne, 1943), p. 13.
8 Carl Niessen, ‘Weshalb Theaterausstellungen?’, NSZ Rheinfront, 13 October 1943.
9 Carl Niessen, ‘Schematischer Entwurf für ein Reichs-Theatermuseum in München’, ground floor, Cologne, 1943, Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne.
10 In the ground plan, Niessen strategically uses the term Systemzeit, a pejorative term in the Nazi vocabulary to denigrate the Weimar Republic, to persuade the Nazi leaders to support his plan of financing the Reichstheaterinstitut.
11 Niessen, ‘Aufgaben der Theaterwissenschaft, Teil 2’.