Introduction: Theater and the Possibility of Enlightenment

KARL EMIL FRANZOS'S Der Pojaz (The Clown, 1905) tells the story of a supposedly toxic culture and the emancipatory potential of the theater. The novel is a failed Bildungsroman of sorts or, as Kata Gellen has described it, a failure-to-launch narrative. It may seem an odd starting point for a chapter concerned largely with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but the novel and its reception tell us a great deal about the place of German culture, and particularly theater, in the German Jewish imagination in the late nineteenth century. Understanding this conceptualization and its evolution throughout the early twentieth century is key to understanding the place of Jewish theater in the East German imagination in the decades following the Holocaust. Looking at East German publications and performances with this particular intellectual and cultural history in mind, it becomes possible to understand the status of Eastern European Jewish culture in the GDR as inherently linked to the state-promoted image of the nation as the already realized besseres Deutschland and the shift away from theater as a means of enlightenment or self-improvement toward its function as a sign that this desired state has already, somehow, been achieved, or is at least well within reach. Crucially, this desired state of being is no longer a goal for Jewish culture but one that is to be reached through the instrumentalization of a particular vision of this culture, a vision that strategically excised the elements of Jewishness deemed antithetical to proletarian universalism and highlighted those that could be used to support East Germany's own selfmythologization as the only antifascist German state.

Der Pojaz describes Sender Glatteis and his journey out of, and back to, the shtetl as he struggles to become an actor on the German-language stage. Franzos sets up the German language and culture as the path to enlightenment and modernity—only to have his protagonist die in the place of his birth after pursuing this very path. It is not that Franzos's narrative undermines the possibility of enlightenment through German culture; the novel in fact depicts a real-world example of exactly the kind of success Sender is striving toward in the form of Bogumil Dawison, the most successful Jewish actor in nineteenth-century Europe.