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.