At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a consensus existed among the German educated middle classes that Greek culture represented an ideal and that Greek fine arts and literature were to be regarded as the epitome of perfection. From Schiller's Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) to Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, the message was the same: Greek culture was unique in that it allowed and encouraged its members to develop their potential to the full so that any individual was able to represent the human species as a whole. The model it provided was, however, inimitable and its standards unattainable, but both were invaluable as objects of careful study. Thus, it is small wonder that all surviving tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were translated into German, some even several times over. Despite this, they were never staged during the eighteenth century.

In 1974, the maverick German director Klaus-Michael Grüber created a remarkable (and much remarked-upon) production of Die Bakchen (The Bacchae) at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre. It was then, and remains to date, the most significant German-language production of, and indeed one of the very few attempts to stage, Euripides' final play in Germany. This essay will attempt to trace the history of German abstention fromthe play and analyze how Grüber's Bacchae responded to that history of ambivalence and neglect, for what was played out in Grüber's mise-en-scène was not only the conflict between Pentheus and Dionysus for the soul of Thebes, but indeed, upon the rapidly shifting cultural and political ground of West Germany, a deeper conflict between mimesis and authenticity, presence and representation, and the soul of the theatre. The first volley in this conflict had been fired more than one hundred years before by Friedrich Nietzsche.

On February 19, 1923, a production of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (Got fun Nekome) opened at New York's Apollo Theatre on 219 West 42nd Street. The moment was auspicious for Jewish theatre in America. One of the more frequently produced and most critically acclaimed plays in the Yiddish canon, God of Vengeance had been performed internationally since its debut in 1907, not only in Yiddish, but in German, Italian, and Russian as well. However, it had never before been seen in English in New York at a major uptown venue like the Apollo. Coming off a two month run at two smaller downtown venues, where it had played to increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds, the English-language production seemed poised to “cross over” from the downtown margins to the Broadway mainstream, something which had never before occurred with any play from the Yiddish repertory. Moreover, the production represented the English-language stage debut of the celebrated Yiddish actor Rudolf Schildkraut in the commanding role of Yekel Tchaftchovitch. In other words, the event implicitly posed the question of whether there was a place for a “great” Yiddish play (albeit, in translation) starring a “great” Yiddish actor (admittedly, working in his third language) within the geographic and symbolic boundaries of Broadway.

We face a social landscape with more (or at least as much) need for radical change than we faced in the 1960s, an era that produced, flawed though it was by lack of follow-through, a mighty impulse toward change…Prison walls are being posed as a final solution. They symbolize our shortsightedness, our fear of the real problems caging us all. The pity is how blindly, enthusiastically, we applaud those who are constructing the walls dooming us.

John Edgar Wideman

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

Over the past decade academic and research libraries throughout the world have taken advantage of the enormous developments in communication technology to improve services to their users. Through the Internet and the World Wide Web researchers now have convenient electronic access to library catalogs, indexes, subject bibliographies, descriptions of manuscript and archival collections, and other resources. This brief overview illustrates how libraries are facilitating performing arts research in new ways.