1 - The Problem of the Actress
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2021
Summary
BY 1903 THE BERLIN ACTRESS Gertrud Eysoldt was famous for her unusual acting style, her captivating physical performances, and perhaps even more so for her startling work in the most controversial female roles in modern German theater. She starred as Henriette in Strindberg's Rausch (Intoxication), Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, Lulu in Wedekind's Erdgeist, Nastja in Gorki's Nachtasyl (A Night's Lodgings), and the title roles in Wilde's Salome and Hofmannsthal's Elektra. In an essay for Bühne und Welt in 1903, culture and theater critic Marie Luise Becker commented on Eysoldt's seeming affinity for such characters:
They say after the success of last winter that Gertrud Eysoldt is best suited for the roles of women of modern decadence. Those who scatter around them that secret, wildly sensual and unspeakable bliss and a nameless debauchery. These female figures, the demons and witches of our time—this will turned woman, which modern man seems to fear—are the heroines of the young dramatists. Earthspirits, abhorred by the bourgeoisie just as they were burned centuries ago, rise up before the poet out of the fog and haze. Gertrud Eysoldt makes them human.
In these notable roles Eysoldt became an icon of the modernist theater. Becker also indicates that she embodied many other key points of interest in the modern age. Her description illustrates how the actress could present Nietzsche with a problem encompassing crucial categories including selfhood (Charakter), appearance (Schein), and power (Macht). If, as Becker further contends, men “tremble[d] before the demon of the female spirit” (ibid.), then actresses like Eysoldt became very real incarnations of that fear in their performances on stage and in their defiant existence as women in the social world.
It should therefore come as little surprise that the actress appears as a recurring discursive figure in a range of texts concerned with the interrelated issues of “the modern,” gender, and subjectivity. These were contested categories for artists, cultural critics, philosophers, and scientists, raising issues that frequently divided the German and Austrian intellectual and cultural elite along the lines of conservative and progressive views on modernity.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021