Summary
THE FIGURE OF THE ACTRESS occupied German and Austrian culture and thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and prominent actresses such as Gertrud Eysoldt and Tilla Durieux became recognizable and recognized participants in modern aesthetic, social, and philosophical discourses. Actresses thus played a significant and active part in shaping emerging modernist theater aesthetics and performance practices as well as influential strains of modern thought. The power and influence that actresses exerted in this period did not go unnoticed by their contemporaries. In his 1908 tract on Die Frau in der Kunst (Woman in Art), the conservative critic Karl Scheffler acknowledged that actresses had achieved a notable and influential position in the theater. He writes: “With the current circumstances of our time we must regularly deal with the actress. One could no longer do without her.” Scheffler was not pleased with these circumstances. Indeed, for Scheffler and other antifeminists, as the performances and careers of individual actresses attracted interest, the figure of the actress came to serve as a crystallization point for anxieties about modernity, gender, and subjectivity. He thus hoped that the future might bring an end to this trend, concluding: “But it is not impossible that a time will come when her position in the theater arts will be greatly limited again” (ibid., 70). Here, in closing, I will take Scheffler's proposition as impetus to look forward from the turn of the century to the Weimar Republic, and offer a few concluding remarks about the figure of the actress as a continuously problematic subject and actresses as continuously problematic subjects.
The revolutionary spirit of the immediate postwar period and the new laws and policies that attended the Weimar Republic's founding affected the theater no less than other areas of life in Germany. In 1919 the Deutscher Bühnenverein (German Stage Association), which represented theater management, and the Genossenschaft deutscher Bühnenangehöriger (Association of German Stage Professionals), the union for performers and other practitioners, negotiated a Tarifvertrag (wage contract) that offered significantly increased stability and protections for professional actors and theater artists (set and lighting designers, wardrobe, hair and make-up artists, etc.).
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- The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought , pp. 188 - 202Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021