Max Reinhardt's theatre is an intriguing example of the social function of commodification in the late nineteenth century; while critics praised him as the leading figure of a renewed theatre, they also blamed him for a merely decorative style. Notwithstanding the fact that economic success was a substantial precondition of Reinhardt's theatre, Reinhardt's style was highly eclectic and determined by a visual or pictorial order rather than by literary concepts. But this theatre not only followed an aesthetic programme, it also answered to a major change in German society: the process of urbanization which produced a new community of urban dwellers which had to be integrated in the role models of society. The paradoxical reception of Reinhardt thus is not only a matter of taste but rather the hallmark of bourgeois theatre in a period of transition, rearticulating the cultural legacy by commodifying it for a new audience.

When in 1926 Leopold Jessner (1878–1945) staged Hamlet at the Prussian State Theatre in Berlin, the production created a major scandal. This uproar was not only related to aesthetic matters but also to the discourse of national identity. With reference to Marvin Carlson's concept of the ‘haunted stage’ the article examines the traces of this scandal in the genealogy of Hamlet on the German stage and its intersection with the politics of national identity. These traces indicate that German productions of Hamlet have always been determined by an implicit politics of exclusion. Jessner's production, by contrast, offered a radical re-reading of Hamlet, aiming to adapt it for the, then newly democratized society. The rejection of this adaptation by major parts of the audience, thus revealed the still powerful and active anti-democratic forces in the Weimar Republic.