Conjuring Berlin
How best to grasp the project of Berlin? Why not start with Shakespeare’s Henry V? For if ever there was a piece that took upon itself the charge of impossible invention, challenging its actors and inviting its audience to co-create a world, it is Henry V. There are elaborate battles across the sea involving impossibly complex constellations of troops—in short, the story exceeds theatre’s immediate means. And that, in turn, occasions the chorus’s exhortation to the audience, in the Prologue, to
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth,
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning th’ accomplishment of many years
Into an hourglass.
The project of Berlin is no less ambitious; its opportunities for invention and imagination no less exciting.
If Shakespeare’s history plays famously focus upon the trials and tribulations of life at various royal courts, Lutes’s graphic novel and Maher’s play focus on the trials and tribulations of life in the modern metropolis. Thus, in place of the earls and dukes and courtiers, we have the extraordinary cross-section of characters that make up the budding and buzzing capital of Germany during the final years of the Weimar Republic, between 1928 (about a decade after the end of World War I) and the rise of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists in 1933.
Berlin in the 1920s was one of the most important urban centers in Europe, on par with London and Paris. And the challenge that Shakespeare points to—the challenge of creating a giant and far-away world on a small stage—that’s a challenge that our production embraces with relish. We get a sense of the extraordinary effervescence of invention in this city—in the visual arts, in jazz, in journalism (there were some 4,700 newspapers published in Germany during the period of our piece, with about 200 in the city of Berlin alone; that’s Kurt Severing’s world, but also David Schwartz’s when he sells copies of the AIZ, the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung or the Workers Illustrated Newspaper, in the rain), in politics (there were 40 different political parties represented in the German parliament—which accounts for Hitler and Goebbels coming to town, since the Nazis were a party on the rise), in sexuality and individual expression (in 1919, the early sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for the Study of Sexuality, in Berlin, and it soon gained international renown as a center advocating for greater understanding of and legal protections for homosexuality and LGBTQ rights. The Nazis occupied and vandalized the Institute as soon as they came to power, burning almost the entirety of its considerable library in the book burnings in Berlin in May of 1933). It was a place and a time of intense invention and intense reaction. It was a time of intense inflation and intense unemployment. And in the midst of it all, the city grew and grew, doubling in population every 25 years or so, beginning in 1820, when it was a city of 200,000, to 1905 when its population was two million. By 1925 it had doubled again to four million. As the capital of a recently united Germany, the intense struggle for political power in the wake of the great depression of 1929 was waged in parliament and on the streets. This is the story we will tell—a story of urbanity, invention, innovation, rapid change, bustle, overcrowding, ambition, dissent, growing political violence and disorder, disorientation, artistic ferment, love and intimacy, violence and despair.
Crucially, this is less the story of kings and rulers (although we have one of them) than a story of a cross-section of extraordinary ordinary people. And in the midst of it all, we will extend a familiar invitation to you, Court’s audience, to join us, by lending us your imagination, by, as Shakespeare puts it, dividing one actor “into a thousand parts.” What an exciting journey it will be, to a world that is at once very different and far away and, alas, not so different or far away from ours in Chicago, in the USA, in this moment. Welcome to Berlin!