5 | Fidelio and Faust in the German ‘Wende’ of 1989/90

Moray McGowan

Both Beethoven’s Fidelio and Goethe’s Faust had, in the course of the nineteenth century, become central constitutive elements of German national culture, and they remained so in the twentieth. The Cold War turned them into contested trophies. Thus throughout the German Democratic Republic’s forty-year history from 1949 to 1989, high on the East German state’s cultural agenda was to claim itself, and not the supposedly neo-fascist successor regime in the West, to be the true heir and custodian of the ‘Erbe’, this cultural heritage. Subsequently, and consequently, during the German ‘Wende’ of 1989/90 (a problematic term, but used here to denote the implosion and disappearance of the GDR), both works had productions with remarkable, ambivalent relationships to their historical moment.

The productions of Fidelio and Faust that concern us here both took place in one East German city, Dresden. It was here that the ‘Wende’ can be said to have begun, even though subsequent events in Leipzig and Berlin have become and remained more famous. It was on the streets of Dresden that violent dispersal of demonstrations was replaced, in early October 1989, by the first acts of dialogue between the forces of order and the still unrecognized organizations of popular protest, and it was at the Dresden Staatsschauspiel that representatives of the theatre workers of the GDR, who had a significant if ambivalent role in the protest movement, took what became the emblematic collective public stance of the GDR’s protesting artists, with the famous text ‘Wir treten aus unseren Rollen heraus’, read from the stage after every performance in the Staatsschauspiel from 6 October 1989, the night before the state’s fortieth birthday, until late November of that year.¹

Fidelio in Dresden, 7 and 8 October 1989

The weekend of 7 and 8 October 1989 in Dresden saw the remarkable concatenation of three already interconnected sets of events: firstly, the celebrations to mark the GDR’s fortieth birthday; secondly, a series of protest demonstrations and reactions to them by police and party; thirdly the premiere, in the Sächsische Staatsoper, the city’s opera house (usually called the Semperoper after its architect Gottfried Semper), of Christine Mielitz’s production of Beethoven’s opera of oppression and liberation, Fidelio. What was represented on stage both echoed and challenged what was happening on the streets and in the city’s corridors of power. Briefly, thrillingly, opera, production, reception and extra-theatrical reality resonated together.² But this conjuncture of art and life at a historic moment also offers a case study in the uneasy and temporally contingent relationship of appositeness, art, monument and kitsch.

Beethoven’s opera charts a movement from imprisonment to freedom, despotism to justice. Mielitz’s production related the opera unmistakeably to GDR realities, though with a heart-stopping closeness she could hardly have anticipated when planning or even rehearsing it. For meanwhile, in early October 1989, in the police cells and temporary holding stations of Dresden, scenes of violence against its citizens by representatives of a regime in its death throes were being played out. At the same time on the streets of Dresden, a genuinely popular movement turned from inchoate and sometimes violent protest to peaceful, purposeful, democratic action. Also at the same time, leading figures within the local hierarchy of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the ruling party in the GDR, decided against the use of military force against their own people, and in favour of dialogue. This decision sent a crucial signal to protesters in other cities, especially Leipzig (where the security forces were still issued with live ammunition on 9 October³): peaceful demonstration was possible, representations might be listened to. The following day, Monday 9 October, saw the weekly Leipzig demonstration grow from 10,000 the previous week to 70,000⁴; the GDR revolution as a mass, popular, peaceful movement was truly underway. In this sense, 7-8 October 1989 in Dresden is the crucial catalytic moment of the East German ‘Wende’.

Let me, therefore, briefly trace the events of early October in Dresden⁵, in order then to bring out their multi-layered relationship to Mielitz’s production, its first performances and their reception. By summer 1989, mass dissatisfaction in the GDR had reached an intense pitch. Thousands of citizens trying to leave the GDR occupied West German embassies in other Eastern Block countries, including that in Prague in September. When these squatters were permitted to emigrate to the West, reports that the special trains would pass through Dresden led, in early October, to several nights of angry protest around the railway station, escalating violence and escalating police response.

Hans Modrow, Bezirkssekretär (district chief) of the SED, was under strong pressure to maintain tight control in the run-up to the 7 October celebrations of the GDR’s 40th birthday. Party leader Erich Honecker had explicitly urged wholesale suppression of dissent, and the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the MfS or Stasi, had begun preventative arrests.⁶ A tank division was put on alert. The army, called in by Modrow, came on the streets on 5 October. The railway station remained a gathering and sparking point for protests, which, though, now involved not just embittered would-be emigrants, but others peacefully demanding reforms in the GDR itself, a stance which, not for the first time, was interpreted in MfS reports as a more serious threat to the GDR’s integrity. The party, the MfS and the police now concentrated on maintaining order and a semblance of state loyalty on 7 October. But they failed to stop the demonstrations that evening. One, singing the Internationale and chanting ‘Wir bleiben hier’, ‘We’re staying here’, marched right past the City Hall, where Mayor Berghofer was hosting the fortieth anniversary celebration.

A further demonstration was planned for the Theaterplatz, directly in front of the Semperoper, for 3 pm on 8 October. A telegram from Honecker urged: ‘Alles ist im Keim zu ersticken.’⁷ The demonstration was violently dispersed, and 150 demonstrators arrested, including members of the Semperoper ensemble itself. ⁸ At this stage, Modrow too was still endorsing violent action and arrests.

Shortly after 6pm on 8 October, the local MfS General Horst Böhm rang the SEDBezirksleitung for approval to use force to disperse a further demonstration of some 5,000 marching from the railway station into the town. Modrow, though, was at the opera. Around 8pm about 1500 demonstrators were surrounded by police on Prager Strasse. This windswept pedestrian zone between high-rise blocks of prefabricated public housing, with a large black statue of Lenin at its focus, symbolized the socialist dream. Confrontation here between the ‘Volk’ and the ‘Volkspolizei’ sharply exposed the bankruptcy of the SED’s claim to be a people’s party. Police began to isolate groups of demonstrators; the crowd, singing ‘Dona nobis pacem’, ‘We shall overcome’ and the Internationale, refused to disperse. This time, though, the cycle of violence was interrupted. A group was chosen, later called the ‘Gruppe der 20’, who succeeded in negotiating a peaceful end to the demonstration that evening and also in getting an audience with mayor Berghofer in the city hall the following morning.

While this development still depended, crucially, on the actions of two senior regional SED members, Modrow and Berghofer, who were, of course, trying to retain power by strengthening their reputation as reformers, nonetheless the pattern of violent suppression of popular protest had been broken: a crucial signal that was immediately understood in Leipzig the following day. In less than a week, from 3 to 9 October 1989, the potential if not yet actual face of GDR politics and society had been transformed.

At the climax of this week of tense political drama, Christine Mielitz’s Dresden production of Beethoven’s Fidelio had its premiere. This production had been justified to the cultural authorities as a work of the humanist canon to mark a dual anniversary: the two hundredth of the French revolution and the fortieth of the founding of the GDR. From the founding of the GDR, opera had an explicit role to play in the construction of the new socialist nation⁹, and Beethoven, we have already noted, was central to the ‘Erbe’ that the GDR contested bitterly with the West German Federal Republic. In 1952 the SED used the 125^th anniversary of Beethoven’s death to attack ‘die amerikanischen Kulturbarbaren und ihre Lakaien’: in Bonn (Beethoven’s birthplace, and since 1949 the West German capital): ‘werden Beethovens erhabene Forderungen nach Frieden und Völkerfreundschaft mit Füßen getreten.’¹⁰ In 1970, GDR Minister of Culture Klaus Gysi wrote: ‘Beethoven belongs to us’, because ‘he too struggled inexhaustibly against the injustices and arbitrariness of the ruling classes.’¹¹ Fidelio, or extracts from it, were standard fare at official events such as the opening of the Palast der Republik in East Berlin on 23 April 1976. ¹²

Precisely this complacent appropriation of artists such as Beethoven made it hard for works of what the GDR saw as its ‘Erbe’ to be refused performance, even if their potential for explosive critique was actually apparent. Mielitz had to attend several meetings at up to Bezirksleitung level, including with Modrow himself, to gain approval for her production: ‘Die ahnten natürlich, daß da etwas auf sie zukommt. Aber nicht einer hat wirklich gewagt, das zu verbieten.’¹³

Beethoven began Fidelio in the revolutionary excitement of the mid 1790s, and its theme of wrongful incarceration and the powerful music of the prisoners’ chorus have ‘compelled associations with principles of political liberty’, as David Dennis says in his study of Beethoven in German Politics. ¹⁴ In Ernst Bloch’s words: ‘Jeder künftige Bastillensturm ist in Fidelio intendiert.’¹⁵ But, Dennis continues, ‘the famous trumpet call announcing salvation at the hands of an aristocratic redeemer complicates reception of this “rescue opera” as a piece of revolutionary propaganda.’ It espouses humane values, enlightenment and liberty, but these are realized through a representative of the existing order, the Minister, Don Fernando, who rights the wrongs committed by the despotic prison governor Pizarro.

Moreover, Fidelio is a work whose invocation of high-minded but abstract ideals makes it susceptible to being harnessed to mutually contradictory causes. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 it served to celebrate Metternich’s restoration of the old order in Europe. By the 1830s its reception as the opera of the German nation, as a key performance of German nationalist aspirations, was well underway. ¹⁶ The National Socialists enthusiastically appropriated this tradition; Richard Eichenauer, in the journal Music and Race, calls Fidelio ‘the first truly Nordic opera’.¹⁷ These are reminders that concepts such as ‘freedom’ are intrinsically empty and can be filled many ways, and secondly that in the performing arts, the contexts of production, performance and reception are crucial variants of a work’s constantly reconstituted ‘meaning’. Against the political background of Dresden in early October 1989 sketched above, what then were the characteristics of Mielitz’s production of Fidelio?

The minutes of a ‘Discussion of the concept and model for Fidelio’ on 25 January 1989 report Mielitz’s declared rationale for the production: The French Revolution had led Beethoven to the conclusion that:

im Grunde [tötet] jede Revolution sich selber. Was aber eigentlich nicht sein sollte. [...] Man kann sich mit dem ‘Fidelio’ heute nicht hinter einem Mantel- und Degenstück verstecken [...] Pizarro ist ein Beamter des Geheimdienstes, ein an eine bestimmte Richtung gebundener Mensch, der von seiner Sendung überzeugt ist. Er ist nicht ‘böse’ schlechthin, sondern er hat sich eingerichtet an einem schauerlichen Ort. Der Minister kommt nicht aus einem fremden Staat, sondern dem Bestandteil eines Staates.

Das Stück ist aktuell und kommt uns allen zu [...] Wir dürfen nicht feige sein und sagen, was wir zu sagen haben. Es darf nichts unter den Teppich gekehrt werden.’¹⁸

This is a courageous conception, even as late as January 1989, given that of the twenty-four people present at this meeting some, almost certainly, will have been MfS informers. Mielitz’s direct engagement with GDR conditions is also apparent in her suggestions for the set made at the same meeting: ‘hohe Wände, einmal in Schwarz, einmal in Betonstruktur, grau […] Auf der Drehscheibe Wachturm […] 3 Gitterwände (Betonpfeiler mit Drahtzaunfeldern)’.¹⁹ The set for the actual production in October adhered to this closely.

Figure 5.1 Fidelio, Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden, 7/8 October 1989: The Main Set

Beethoven’s themes of loss of liberty, dignity and justice, and the struggle to regain them, were thus played on a set of walls, wire and watchtowers under neon light (see figure 5.1).²⁰ Marcelline, the daughter of prison warder Rocco, dutifully, even with a sense of enjoyment, controls the prisoners’ mail, removing photographs and books (see figure 5.2). In the prison governor’s office stand rows of the very truncheons with which, in early October, close to and sometimes within sight of the opera house, the Dresden police severely beat up demonstrators (see figure 5.3).

Figure 5.2 Fidelio, Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden, 7/8 October 1989: Rocco’s office and postroom

Figure 5.3 Fidelio, Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden, 7/8 October 1989: The guardroom

From the start, Mielitz had planned and rehearsed a production that would unmistakeably refer to GDR conditions and experience. But given the events on the streets outside, the beatings, the transportations to Bautzen prison, the general climate of suspicion, surveillance and shock, the extent of the production’s immediacy was both extraordinarily prescient and extraordinarily intense. ²¹

Nonetheless, Mielitz does not, as the opera reaches its climax, submerge her critique in a wash of undifferentiated humanist pathos. For example, when the Minister Don Fernando to whom Rocco now transfers his loyalties issues a general pardon, the gratitude expressed by Mielitz’s chorus of prisoners and relatives is muted and dutiful rather than effusive or spontaneous. A gracious pardon from a relatively enlightened representative of power is no substitute for democratic rights. As the liberated prisoners step forward to fraternize with the audience, they find themselves still stopped by a fence. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, the freed Florestan carries the same briefcase and wears the same lapel emblems as the Minister himself.

It is of course difficult to know how many of the production’s cautionary emphases were picked up by the audience. The premiere was interrupted repeatedly by tumultuous applause, for example at the question: ‘O Freiheit! Kehrest du zurück?’ (‘O Freedom! Will you return?’) Almost certainly, long term restrictions on their freedom, compounded by the immediate shock of the demonstrations and the state’s harsh response on those very same early October days, meant that for the audience in the Semperoper that weekend emotional identification overcame critical reflection. The closing applause, lasting twelve minutes, may well have been for the production’s emotive signals as much as its musical quality or its critical differentiation, its moments of aesthetically productive refusal simply to mirror either events on the streets or their popular interpretation. Thus the production was in part a victim of the historical processes it seemed so resoundingly to articulate and which were giving it such thrilling immediacy. In 1995, Mielitz recalls her concern ‘daß der Theaterabend an dieser unmittelbaren Konfrontation mit der Realität zerbrechen würde’, for if art echoes life too closely, ‘kann Kunst auch einfach aufhören.’²²

What, meanwhile, was the local SED leadership doing? The answer to that suggests that Mielitz’s production was not the only staging of Fidelio in Dresden that weekend. Possibly presciently, the SED leadership had scheduled their fortieth anniversary reception in the town hall on 7 October to coincide with the premiere at the Semperoper. Modrow noted later:

Damit hatten wir eine Begründung geschaffen, die Festlichkeit zum DDR-Geburtstag vom Kunstereignis zu trennen. Das gab es bis dahin nicht. Semperopern-Premieren galten bisher geradezu als heilig.²³

Thus, by skulking in the town hall, Modrow and his fellow SED dignitaries avoided being confronted with a staging of Fidelio that would have uncomfortably resembled the reality on which their grip was rapidly slipping. But through a conjunction of ironies, precisely in the town hall they could not avoid being confronted with a surge of mass popular energy that, just as uncomfortably for them, resembled a staging of Fidelio. Moreover, it took place on a stage of the SED’s own making. For in the 1950s a huge open space was cleared in front of the town hall for those performances of mass solidarity that were fundamental to the state’s identity and self-legitimation.²⁴ Now, though, on 7 October, around 8pm, whilst the performance of Fidelio in the Semperoper which had begun at 7 was reaching its first climax, the prisoners’ chorus towards the end of Act One, Hans Modrow recalls pushing aside a heavy curtain in the town hall:

Über den Rathausplatz auf die Leningrader Straße ging in relativ schnellem Schritt eine grössere Menschenmenge, geordnet, völlig lautlos, man sah in Bildausschnitt weder rechts noch links das Ende. Nun kamen auch andere Festgäste ans Fenster. Peinlichkeit. Wachsende Unruhe. Der Empfang war quasi zu Ende. Jetzt plötzlich drangen Rufe hinein: ‘Wir sind das Volk!’ ‘Schämt euch!’²⁵

In this defiant march past on a space designed for marches past, the demonstrators take at its word, and throw back in its face, the SED state’s claim to be the heir of the humanist ‘Erbe’. Whilst Modrow and the other functionaries peer out through the curtain, the demonstrators stage their version of the emancipatory energies of Fidelio. At least retrospectively, Modrow’s version of this moment is also narrated in terms of a theatrical or filmic event, viewed from an elevated position like a theatre box, through a curtain, the protesters a framed and choreographed body of marchers. ‘Die französische Revolution verstand sich als ein wiedergekehrtes Rom’, argues Walter Benjamin²⁶: that is, actors in processes of profound historical change depend on existing models and narratives to shape and direct their actions. Could one not observe, in some of the actions on 7 and 8 October and certainly in the subsequent narratives of those events, political actors who understood themselves and their circumstances in terms of Beethoven’s Fidelio? Modrow and Berghofer were determined to be the Minister Don Fernando rather than Pizarro (the latter role would seem best filled by the hawkish MfS General Horst Böhm). On the GDR national stage, Honecker’s brief successor Egon Krenz, who tried to cling to power by applying ‘Wende’, the term of the moment, to his desperate rearguard actions in October and early November 1989, might be seen as manoeuvring himself into Don Fernando’s role.²⁷ Don Fernando, after all, offers an amnesty and the rectification of abuses (including the punishment of a corrupt subordinate, Pizarro) whilst leaving the existing order unchanged.

Modrow did not attend the opera on 7 October, and on the afternoon of 8 October he still endorsed a tough line against the demonstrations. But at 6pm on 8 October he went to the opera, sat through a production of Fidelio whose references to the GDR in general and to the events in Dresden in particular are unmistakable. In Berghofer’s words, ten years later:

Modrow weilte in der Semper-Oper, in der zweiten Aufführung von Fidelio, wo auf der Bühne dasselbe stattfand wie auf den Straßen.²⁸

At the prisoners’ words: ‘Sprecht leise, haltet euch zurück/Denn wir sind belauscht mit Ohr und Blick’,²⁹ the audience, instead of applauding, stood in silent tribute. Some eyewitnesses, at least, recall that at this moment Modrow and his party stood in silent tribute too.³⁰ Here too, Mielitz’s production, whether by artistic intuition or chance, was remarkably prescient: she altered the conclusion slightly to make clear that Don Fernando’s decision to free the prisoners is motivated by the appearance and temper of the masses calling for change. As they threaten to swamp him, he joins in their final chorus.³¹

The exact relationship of this artistic experience to Modrow’s processes of political decision-making is of course impossible to determine, but the coincidence is remarkable. That evening, 8 October, he agreed to a process of dialogue that broke the circle of violence and opened the way to reform. Moreover, the parallels between work, stage realization and contemporary reality which were achieved with this historic production of Fidelio were no less remarkable for not, of course, being complete.

But can the thrill of a moment of theatre in a specific moment of history be preserved by repeating it unchanged? What meanings does this production generate when, having returned to the repertoire in the mid-1990s, it continues to be performed, with unchanged staging, though a varying cast of singers (for example on 4, 6 and 11 October 2004, on the fifteenth anniversary of the momentous events that surrounded its premiere), when the real contours of the GDR revolution are a fading memory?

In GDR times, arguably, though the Semperoper was not free of commercial pressures, it came as close as such an institution was ever likely to to a democratization of opera-going, with tickets at 18 marks and 80,000 subscriptions for local people, plus dedicated performances for youth, union and other groups. Moreover, the characteristic GDR public perception of the theatre as one of the rare spaces for the articulation of collective dissent, created a strong sense of solidarity between audience and performers. This reached its peak in 1989 in many theatres, but this moment of solidarity, harmony, even mourning for the failed socialist experiment, was wedded to the historic moment of the GDR’s collapse. A decade or more later, the opera no longer expresses so unambiguously the interests of the people who experienced the emotions it articulates. The moment of revolutionary euphoria is now not theirs, but a traded commodity. The voice that, on that extraordinary weekend, spoke for them and with them, now speaks of them; that it does so, unchanged, in their masks, only intensifies the irony. Since 1989, the Semperoper has necessarily adapted to the Federal Republic’s practices and prices. To see the ‘Private performance’ of Fidelio on 26 October 2001, for example, you would have had to contact Drescher Incoming & Tourismus GmbH or Dr. Augustin Studienreisen GmbH. In October 2002 a tourism website offering tickets for the forthcoming performance on 18 December 2002 explained the price of €116 per ticket in Preisklasse 3 thus: ‘Die Kartenpreise enthalten Gebühren von Zwischenhändlern und weichen daher stark vom aufgedruckten Originalpreis ab.’ ³² The thrilling political immediacy of Mielitz’s Fidelio has itself become captive to the supply and demand mechanisms of a speculative market.

When Fidelio is performed today, visiting audiences can vicariously relive a ‘Wende’ they were never part of, an experience heightened by the proximity of those Dresdeners in the contemporary audience who are still moved to tears by the reenactment of a doubly historic moment. Without a single onstage sign being changed, the extraordinary conjunction of art and life on 7 and 8 October 1989 becomes kitsch, precisely because of art’s Janus-faced potential not only to convert experience into the narrative through which and as which the experience can be recalled, but also to offer a spurious pseudoparticipation in the historical experience of others. In 1995, Mielitz denied that reviving the production was an anachronism, arguing that oppression and longings for freedom remain universal human experiences.³³ But precisely the apparent specificity of reference that made and makes Mielitz’s production historic hinders (or will do so for as long as the events of 1989 remain part of what its audiences think they remember) the wider application she claims for it.

It is not just commercial pressures, though, which have changed the meanings of this production of Fidelio. Friedrich Dieckmann, comparing 1989 with 1849, notes that ‘in Dresden, wieder einmal, fand die Revolution als Oper, fand die Oper als Revolution statt.’³⁴ Once the process whereby art converts experience into narrative is underway, the signifier uncouples itself from the initially signified, and gains a wider descriptive force that, while apparently explanatory, actually aids the accession to dominance of a particular narrative of history. Fidelio becomes the GDR revolution as a whole, the GDR revolution as a whole a version of Fidelio. So for example, in October 2000, an article by Klaus von Dohnanyi on ten years of German unification refers thus to the night, a month after the Fidelio production in Dresden, on which the Berlin Wall was opened:

the night of 9 November, 1989, was to become the most unusual night of freedom. Like in the last act of Fidelio, the people came out, blinded by the television floodlights, still unable to believe that they had cast off their chains; they drove, they tumbled across to the West, through the gates in the wall that, just a few minutes earlier, had been an insuperable barrier.’³⁵

As Dohnanyi stresses, the euphoria of 9 November was still relatively inchoate, was not yet directed at unification or the Deutsche Mark. Champions of a reformed socialist GDR fought on: every night from 29 October 1989 onwards members of the Semperoper delivered a statement after each performance associating themselves and their production of Fidelio with the popular protests: ‘Der Wille des Volkes sei geachtet! […] Es ist angetreten, ein demokratisches Land zu errichten, das ein sozialistisches sein kann und wird’.³⁶

But Fidelio’s paeans to freedom are sufficiently unspecific for the thrilling theatrical moment of 7 and 8 October 1989 to be progressively re-read until it becomes but a first step in the teleologically rescripted history of the ‘Wende’ as a triumphal progression towards unification and the victory of Western values. Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s first key public appearance in the GDR after 9 November 1989 was on 19 December 1989 in Dresden. His 10-point plan for German unification had already secured him the initiative, and now his promise of ‘blühende Landschaften’ (‘blossoming landscapes’) meant that there was little doubt who was now meant to go down in history as the GDR’s Don Fernando. On 22 December at the Brandenburg Gate, he restaged the opening of the Wall in front of the world media, reasserting the monopoly of official politics after the unscripted popular moments of 9 November at the Berlin Wall, of the Leipzig Monday demonstrations, and of the weekend of 7/8 October in Dresden. On 7/8 October 1989, Fidelio, as the artistic reflection of a political reality, could at least discomfort the authorities of the city in which it was performed. Today, the narrative of the GDR revolution as a version of Fidelio causes no such discomforts.

Faust in Dresden, 28, 29 and 30 August 1990

Wolfgang Engel’s production of both parts of Faust over three consecutive evenings is an engagement with the Faust myth as it resonates in his own age, an age for which the transcendent themes and scenes seem less central than those of social vision and historical dialectic. (This does not mean the production reduces the play to social, let alone socialist realism.) The production engages with the ideological encrustations of his state’s particular perception of the Faust theme, the work and how it should be performed, and is thus also a continuation of a dialogue with other interpretations and performances of the work. Conceived as a bitter parody of the yawning gulf between the staging of the state and its actual condition, in the circumstances in which it finally reached the stage it became also a wry valediction to the socialist dream.³⁷

Engel began rehearsal for Faust in early 1988, eventually premiering the production in August 1990. Throughout most of its rehearsal period, therefore, his production accompanied the unravelling of the East German state and the values it represented; Engel had initially taken up Faust as a tiresome duty no leading German director could escape; it became, in his hands and in his production’s historical moment, an engagement with a central myth of the GDR’s self-image. By the time the production could actually be performed, it became, literally, an ‘Abkündigung’, an envoi or leavetaking for GDR socialism.

In the GDR, the contested ‘Erbe’ generated contradictions with regard to Faust. On the one hand, it led to productions which sought to strip the play of its Wilhelmine and National Socialist accretions, and also of any trace of Gustav Gründgens’s influential reading of Mephistopheles (the actor, director and theatre manager Gründgens, briefly discredited as a Nazi fellow traveller, had settled in the West and continued his portrayal of Mephistopheles as the Pied Piper in an influential production in Hamburg in the late 1950s).³⁸ There were moves in the GDR to play Faust as Volkstheater, popular theatre, with as little pomp and pathos as possible (ironically, something which Wagner had called for in Faust but which had been swept aside as the play was recruited to serve imperial Germany’s self-aggrandizement). But there were also strongly conservative pressures, precisely since the GDR wished to be seen as sustaining the national canon. Hence, from the beginning, both political support and generous funding were available for the preservation of the heritage Weimar and its poets represented as the ‘Symbol für ein edleres und humaneres Deutschland’ (SED chairman Otto Grotewohl in 1949³⁹). But it was accompanied by close scrutiny of productions of Faust by the highest political circles. A concept of ‘Werktreue’, faithfulness to the work, emerged that related to conservative staging practice as much as actual adherence to a text which, played in full, would subvert comfortable expectations as surely as the most experimental approach.

Ironically, too, the appropriation of Faust for the humanist tradition that East German socialism saw itself as continuing, was often couched in language, and often lay claim to aspects of the text, which recalled the National Socialist reception. The socialist conception of Faust as representative of the energies of the masses, unleashed in the workers’ and peasants’ state GDR, echoed the National Socialist view of Faust as the man of action, and of ‘das Faustische’ as ruthless pursuit of a national purpose: now, under socialism, of course, not of the ‘völkisch’ or racist nation, but of the class-based socialist nation. Faust’s land reclamation project in Faust II and his vision of ‘Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn’,⁴⁰ once ‘perhaps the most quoted Faust line of Fascist Germanistik’,⁴¹ were now harnessed to a new, socialist project.

SED leader Walter Ulbricht’s much-quoted cry, ‘Faust III sind wir!’ (‘Faust III, that’s us!’) may be apocryphal. But in a speech in 1962 he anchored his, and the SED’s, vision of the whole of Germany as a peaceful and prosperous land in a series of direct references to Faust II. He quotes:

Ein Sumpf zieht am Gebirge hin,
Verpestet alles schon Errungene;
Den faulen Pfuhl auch abzuziehn,
Das letzte wär das Höchsterrungene. (11559-62)⁴²

He relates this directly to the antinational and reactionary forces in the Federal Republic who had turned their part of Germany into a foul capitalist morass of exploitation and warmongering. This swamp must be drained, to which end Ulbricht offers the hand of friendship to the working people of the West. Faust, he argues, comes to recognize that only the collective labour of a free people leads to the highest happiness. He quotes Faust II again:

Solch ein Gewimmel möcht’ ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn!
Zum Augenblick dürft’ ich sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
[...]
Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück,
Genieß’ ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick.’ (11579-11586)⁴³

Ulbricht notes at this point that Goethe leaves the results of this collective labour unclear. Goethe had no choice, he suggests, because in the emergent capitalist world in which Goethe was writing, ‘konnte der dritte Teil des Faust auch noch nicht geschrieben werden.’ Only now, one hundred and more years later, have the working people of the GDR begun to write this third part, and the unification of the whole German people in a peace loving and socialist state ‘wird diesen dritten Teil des Faust abschliessen’.⁴⁴

This posturing, comic in retrospect, nonetheless epitomizes the insecurely possessive view of Faust held by the party faithful. Some productions met official approval by presenting Faust as a drama of the people, set in a late bourgeois age in transition to a post-bourgeois and implicitly socialist one, others by reiterating the conception of man (sic) as creator of his own historical destiny, Faust not as unworldly intellectual, but as practical man, challenger and conqueror of the world: the Columbus of his age.

Such conceptions of Faust, a re-import, essentially, of ‘das Faustische’ in proletarian guise, remained firmly part of the GDR’s image of itself, and productions which deviated from it long continued to provoke sanctions. Bertolt Brecht and Egon Monk’s staging of Urfaust, the fragmentary early version of the play, in Potsdam in 1952, which viewed Faust as an unheroic, untrustworthy charlatan, drew attacks from Ulbricht himself⁴⁵, and was withdrawn after only a few performances. Similarly, Adolf Dresen and Wolfgang Heinz’s Faust I in 1968 fell foul of party nervousness towards cultural unorthodoxy in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Dresen’s Faust was a neurotic, nervous, inhibited, sometimes hysterical intellectual, far from the Renaissance man striding to new deeds and instigating human progress demanded by Alexander Abusch, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, in October 1968, during a discussion of the production at the highest level.⁴⁶

Only gradually did official reactions to unorthodox productions of Faust become more tolerant, though this was, arguably, more a function of the state’s disintegration than of an actively endorsed pluralism. By the latter 1980s, the state’s abandonment of its own ideals was now so far progressed that it could no longer afford to engage seriously with artistic questioning of these ideals or their realization. By then it would have been highly improbable for the Staatsrat to convene a special meeting to discuss a Faust production.

In these contexts – firstly, of a relatively more open but still fundamentally conservative official concept of what constituted legitimate stagings of the national drama, and, secondly, of a state and the ideals which underpinned it, in deep and probably terminal crisis – Wolfgang Engel began rehearsing his production of both parts of Faust in Dresden in 1988. This production was eventually premiered over three evenings on 28, 29, and 30 August 1990 (28 August being Goethe’s birthday), in the brief lacuna, the liminal moment, when the GDR’s fate was sealed but not yet executed: after the elections of 18 March 1990 had produced a clear majority for unification on the basis of the capitalist market economy, and the currency union of 3 June 1990 had hastened the collapse of the GDR economy and made its complete helplessness inevitable, but before the final demise and disappearance of the GDR on 3 October 1990, when it was swallowed up into the new, enlarged, but constitutionally essentially unaltered Federal Republic.

The production had four guiding conceptions with major implications for its structure: firstly, that Faust I and Faust II are a single whole: many of the cuts and reorderings of the dialogue and scenes, and the division between the three evenings, sought to draw the themes, figures and action of the two plays together.

Secondly, there is the conception that the whole universe of the play emanates from Faust’s consciousness, expressed visually in the way that his study remained alluded to in the staging throughout (e.g. by the presence of his writing desk). What we see on stage is the drama of a mind at a moment of turmoil and transition in European culture. This is one of several ways in which the performative aspect of the Faust drama is explicitly foregrounded.

Thirdly, Faust’s declaration that he has ‘zwei Seelen, ach, in meiner Brust’ ⁴⁷ is stripped of its encrustations with cliché (a similar problem to that posed for any production of Hamlet by the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy) and taken literally: there are two Fausts, almost always on stage together, played by Christoph Hohmann and by Wolfgang Engel himself. They speak Faust’s lines sometimes in unison, sometimes just out of synchronization, sometimes separately, as a form of externalized inner dialogue, or to differentiate a moment of public utterance from an inner train of thought. Moreover, there is, in this production, no Mephistopheles figure (at least, not until nearly the end of the third evening). His lines are distributed between the two Fausts. Thus the often-voiced idea that Faust and Mephistopheles are dialectically or symbiotically inseparable is staged explicitly. In Engel’s production, they coalesce into one Faust, but this one Faust, having two souls in his breast, is externalized into two physically distinct yet psychologically conjoined Faust figures. Simultaneously unifying and doubling the drama’s central figures unsettles over-familiarity, breaks up over-long monologues and refocuses audience attention. It too foregrounds the inherent theatricality of the Faust figure as both agent and onlooker. Finally, it reinforces the duality, one might say the concentricity, rather than binary polarity, of good and evil.⁴⁸

These radical interventions might well upset purists, though in fact ever since 1829, when Ludwig Tieck bowdlerized the text, cut the anti-clerical sideswipes and added his own prologue, it is rare for productions of Faust not to make substantial changes. Goethe himself, when directing, freely cut and transposed his own and others’ texts.⁴⁹ He understood very well the necessary difference between any dramatic text and its possible realizations even in its own time, let alone 200 years later. Repeatedly, he stressed his Faust’s incommensurability, its resistance to exhaustive interpretation, even its unperformability, and essentially set it free for directors and theatres to do what they could, and would, with it. And after all, and above all, his Faust, accreted over some sixty years, was itself a text in dynamic process, reordering, modernizing, artistically intervening and re-engaging with a disparate, shifting corpus of material in a situation of continuous change. In its own epoch, the sixty years of extraordinary flux that lay either side of the year 1800, Goethe’s Faust shapes its material into the protean form necessary to engage with the onset of modernity in European culture and the first great crisis of Enlightenment rationalism. Recognizing the implications of this through a critical engagement with the material is arguably more relevant to the work’s living achievement than a dogmatic ‘Werktreue’ that regards the text as a sacrosanct work of genius. Engel, via a close though certainly adventurous, in a Barthean sense writerly reading of Goethe’s text and of the history of its subsequent reception, engages with another epochal historical transition, namely the endpoint of an experimental attempt to create a utopian society which, as we saw from Ulbricht’s speech, claimed to be that glimpsed in Faust’s vision.

Engel’s production sought to explore the mental and spiritual condition of GDR society, especially its intellectuals and artists, in its state of final crisis. His production, and the staging by Frank Hänig and costumes by Jutta Harnisch, mixed the timeless with the specifically contemporary. ⁵⁰ There were many allusions to GDR reality – Valentin appears in the uniform of the ‘Nationale Volksarmee’; the scene between Mephistopheles, Gretchen and Martha is set in a doll’s house version of a GDR ‘Plattenbau’ high-rise block (see figure 5.4); part of the ‘klassische Walpurgisnacht’ resembles a carnevalesque satire of the sterile, self-congratulatory rituals of the socialist state’s celebration of the heroic worker; Faust and Mephistopheles’s introduction of paper money to the bankrupt imperial court becomes an introduction to credit- and debit-card culture, complete with ATMs.

Figure 5.4 Faust, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 28/29/30 August 1990: Martha’s house as a doll’s-house GDR apartment

But Engel also changed elements of his planned staging which seemed, with the flux of history, to be now too facile: A huge thousand DM note which had hung at the back of the stage for the paper money scene was removed after the currency reform of 3 June 1990 and does not feature in the premiered version in August. Moreover, though Faust, like Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, turns out to be full of references to walls, borders and imprisonment which immediately resonated with GDR audiences, some of the original text’s references, such as ‘Diese Mauern, diese Wände / Neigen, senken sich zum Ende’ (6695-6) are cut as too crudely referential.⁵¹

But the fourth guiding conception of Engel’s production is the crucial one. Engel’s approach to Faust and to the task of directing Faust at this moment in his state’s history can be most clearly brought out by focusing on a key scene on the third evening, that is, in the second half of Faust II: the scene, more accurately, pair of scenes, where Faust’s vision of a utopian future is followed by his death.

Early in Faust I, Faust wagers with Mephistopheles that should he ever be satisfied with what the latter offers, should he ever ask that the moment remain, then he becomes Mephistopheles’s to do with him as he will. Late in Faust II, Faust experiences a vision that leads him to cry out:

Zum Augenblicke dürft’ ich sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön! [...]
Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück
Genieß’ ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick (11581-6)⁵²

Let us remind ourselves of Faust’s vision:

Eröffn’ ich Räume vielen Millionen,
Nicht sicher zwar, doch tätig-frei zu wohnen [...]
Solch ein Gewimmel möcht’ ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn! (11563-4, 11579-80)⁵³

The last line, like most celebrations of freedom, is eminently quotable, eminently removable from context, endlessly malleable. It was central to National Socialist as well as Communist appropriations of Faust. A life which is ‘nicht sicher zwar, doch tätig-frei’ could, in the early nineteenth century, refer to venture capitalism or the North American frontier; or, in the early twenty-first, to the Blairite enterprise society beyond the nanny state.

But already in Goethe’s play this vision is, in fact, deeply ambivalent. Firstly Faust’s vision is of a future whose prospects of realization are qualified by the conditional ‘dürfte’ (might/would be able to); hence Mephistopheles’s belief that Faust has lost the wager is premature. Secondly, the freedom the vision promises is not to be had without costs (‘nicht sicher zwar’) – this is, after all, reclaimed land behind a presumably breachable floodwall. Thirdly, it has not involved a revolution of property rights or any other kind of rights on existing land, but is, rather, an act that in a real historical context would represent an old order alleviating its problems of overpopulation by exporting them. Fourthly, the project requires ‘tausend Hände’ but ‘ein Geist’, a labouring mass and an executive elite; the earth is being transformed by slaves in a system of antagonistic social relations,⁵⁴ and ‘tätig-freies Wohnen’ is only a visionary promise, somewhere far ahead. At the same time, fifthly, in Faust’s vision ‘freedom’ is neither an abstract ideal nor a gift granted to passive recipients, as it is for example in Fidelio by a minister arriving ex machina. Instead, it is the result of the communal effort of the masses. Sixthly, though, the aging Faust who speaks these words is already blind, and it is partly but not only the blindness of the prophetic seer: during his final speech, he hears what he takes to be workers tilling the new-won land, but they are in fact digging his grave. Thus his vision is surrounded by and perhaps rests on, illusion. Moreover, this is not the end of the play; it is followed by his death, his soul apparently in the clutches of the devil, but then also by his apotheosis and salvation.⁵⁵ Thus the celebration of freedom articulated in these much quoted lines is already substantially qualified, hedged in by, shot through with ironies, in Goethe’s play, and Engel’s production emphasizes this.

In Goethe’s text, Faust is saved by a quasi-religious apotheosis under the aegis of ‘das Ewig-Weibliche’ (the Eternal Feminine), during the salvation scene that closes the whole work. However, we do not need here to add to the huge volume of would-be elucidation of this ambiguous term, since Wolfgang Engel has not only cut the wager from the Prologue (necessarily, since he has merged the Mephistopheles figure with that of his two Fausts). His approach to the conclusion of the play is equally radical. He also cuts the whole of the two final scenes, Faust’s burial and ascension.⁵⁶ This was not uncommon in GDR productions, which, however, usually ended not with Mephistopheles’s final invocation of ‘das Ewig-Leere’ (‘Eternal Emptiness’), but with Faust’s final monologue preceding it, that is, with the utopian vision. Engel’s new final scene in contrast undergoes a number of further crucial modifications. Firstly, Engel introduces Goethe as a figure in the drama, merging the figures of the Wanderer (Goethe’s nickname in the 1770s) and Sorge (Care) into one, who proceeds quite literally to apply the make-up to Engel, as Faust, which signifies his blindness (see figure 5.5):

Figure 5.5 Faust, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 28/29/30 August 1990: Goethe applies the wig and make-up which signals Faust’s blindness

Secondly, this signals a re-separation of the Faust (Wolfgang Engel) and Mephistopheles (Christoph Hohmann) figures, the latter now donning the skullcap and facial make-up that directly, and in the GDR, provocatively, associate him with the most famous German Mephistopheles, Gustav Gründgens (see figure 5.6):

Figure 5.6 Faust, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 28/29/30 August 1990: Mephisto with characteristic Gustav Gründgens skullcap and make-up

At the moment when Faust attempts his rapacious intervention into history, ruthlessly disposing of Philemon and Baucis, he becomes both blind and separate from Mephistopheles (visually distinguishable, speaking separate lines), while at the same time Mephistopheles acquires power over him.

Faust’s fatal delusion, taking the noise of the ‘Lemuren’ digging his grave to be the spades of the workmen labouring on his land reclamation project, is represented on stage by the laying of a railway track, section by section, from upstage down towards the footlights and the auditorium (see figure 5.7):

Figure 5.7 Faust, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 28/29/30 August 1990: The ‘Lemuren’ lay the railway track (the production’s version of Faust’s land reclamation project)

Engel then replaces the ‘freies Land’ verse with a dialogue in which Goethe, peeping like a prompter from behind a half-open door (see figure 5.8), has Faust try out three other versions, before settling on the one we find in the published text (they are in fact all versions to be found in Goethe’s own variants):

Faust:	Solch ein Gewimmel möcht ich sehn, Auf eignem Grund und Boden stehn!
Goethe:	Auf wahrhaft eignem Grund und Boden stehn.
Faust:	Solch ein Gewimmel möcht ich sehn, Auf wahrhaft eignem Grund und Boden stehn!
Goethe:	Auf wahrhaft freiem Grund und Boden stehn.
Faust:	Solch ein Gewimmel möcht ich sehn, Auf wahrhaft freiem Grund und Boden stehn!
Goethe:	Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.
Faust:	Solch ein Gewimmel möcht ich sehn, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.57

Figure Faust, 5.8 Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 28/29/30 August 1990: Goethe as Prompter has Faust rehearse three versions of the famous ‘freies Land’ verse

Thus Engel’s treatment, in this closing scene, of this – especially in the GDR, recalling Ulbricht’s Faust II speech – most ideologically charged line of the play, both ensures it maximum attention and renders it relative, one of a number of possible goals, possible outcomes of historical processes. Its ideological accretions are thus sharply silhouetted. Moreover, the blindness of a man who believes to the end that those who are digging his grave are labouring for his ideals evokes the blindness, real or willed, of Honecker and the SED leadership in its final phase.

Now we see another reason there is no salvation scene in Engel’s Faust. Rejecting apotheosis, Engel is rejecting ideologically invoked closure, Ulbricht’s and his successors’ false utopias. Faust’s vision is as much autocratic as democratic, but now Faust is dead; there will be no grand socialist project, no Faust III. Engel’s Faust, whose genesis as a production closely coincided with the death throes of the East German socialist state, is its epitaph.⁵⁸ Additionally, in Faust I, Faust drinks a magic potion to escape tedium vitae; magic is what, just before this final scene, he abjures. Engel’s production is a melancholy acknowledgement that the GDR version of socialism was not science, but astrology, quack medicine. As Faust dies, Mephistopheles fills a balloon with Faust’s breath and bursts it. Mephistopheles’s life principle, ‘das Ewig-Leere’, worthless, meaningless delusion, has seemingly triumphed.

This, though, is not quite the end of Engel’s version of Faust. Instead it is a signal for Engel, as Faust, to remove the wig Goethe had applied to him and tiptoe cautiously, hand in hand with Mephistopheles, down the railway tracks from stage back to stage front, towards the audience. This is a richly ambivalent closing image: The railway tracks recall the onset of the industrial age, Germany’s first railways coming into being around the time of Goethe’s death: a material image of the intellectual and cultural transition Goethe’s life and work spanned, encapsulated and expressed (see figure 5.9):

Figure 5.9 Faust, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 28/29/30 August 1990: The final scene: Faust unwigged: Faust and Mephisto deliver Goethe’s ‘Envoi’ as they walk down the railway tracks towards the audience

Railway tracks both divide and unite: progress and destruction as dialectical twins. The tracks also suggest both a closed linear model of historical development – a criticism of the simplistic version of the Marxist view of history adopted in the GDR’s official pronouncements about itself and its future – and its opposite, an openness: the tracks point directly into the audience, but do not otherwise specify their destination. Not without a rueful echo of The Wizard of Oz, Faust and Mephistopheles walking down them towards the audience are taking the path of history into an uncertain future, that of the audience, sitting in a GDR theatre in August 1990, after the fall of the wall and the collapse of the SED, after the elections of March 1990 which represented a decision for unification, after the currency union of 3 July 1990 which sealed the fate of the GDR economy, and only weeks before the final dissolution of the GDR on 3 October 1990.

There is a further self-referential ambiguity: not only does Goethe the author appear as a figure in the drama, and participate, sometimes, as a director or at least a prompter, but the empirical director of the production, Wolfgang Engel, now appears too. Anticipating, both literally and metaphorically, his curtain call before the curtain has fallen, Engel removes his Faust wig, and steps out of his role. ‘Wir treten aus unseren Rollen heraus’, the ensemble of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden declared from the stage in the crucial weeks of October and November 1989, and now their director is walking down the tracks towards the audience, abandoning the separate, ambiguous role of the theatre worker between protest and privilege, to become part of the audience who are now at the sharp end of history, facing the future towards which, open or not, they are being driven with the inevitability of a runaway train.

Thus though Engel cuts the salvation scene, his ending does not exhaust itself in reapplying to the GDR Goethe’s jaundiced view of the utopian social engineering inspired by the French Revolution.⁵⁹ Instead, his ending recalls Brecht’s epilogue to Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, which declares that the ending is ‘kein rechter Schluß’ (‘not a proper ending’) and calls on the audience to work one out for themselves. Engel closes not with Mephistopheles’s scornful ‘Ewig-Leere’, but with the ‘Abkündigung’ (‘Envoi’) Goethe wrote for Faust around 1800, but subsequently cut:

Vielleicht, daß sich was Beßres freilich fände –
Des Menschen Leben ist ein ähnliches Gedicht:
Es hat wohl Anfang, hat ein Ende, Allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.
Ihr Herren, seid so gut und klatscht nun in die Hände!⁶⁰

The altered gendering of the ending, the direct replacement, as the vast work’s final idea, of ‘das Ewig-Weibliche’ with ‘Ihr Herren’ cannot be accidental or insignificant. Certainly, this is an Envoi to the GDR, and to the GDR theatre in its ambivalently symbiotic relationship with the state.⁶¹ But additionally, I would argue that just as ‘das Ewig-Weibliche’ may not relate to specific biological or even cultural gender, so too the homoeroticism signalled from the beginning of the production in the smacking kiss with which the two Fausts greet each other⁶², may be primarily allegorical too.⁶³ Honecker’s Germany was a ‘Herrenstaat’, Kohl’s hardly less so. Goethe’s text, whose prologue is dominated by the ‘Herr’, the Lord, closes with a scene where the female principle reigns in multiple forms; but it is a female principle constructed by, and for the salvation of, a male world. Arguably, with the deletion of this final scene, Engel declares that the option of self-absolution on the part of the at least allegorically and perhaps empirically patriarchal perpetrators of history via transcendent intervention by an idealized matriarchal principle, must be abandoned. In the context of the widely observed gendering of unification, the ending is a sarcastic act of congratulation to Western triumphalism, an ending which deletes the allegorical feminine, the self-interested celebration of a nurturing utopia, only to reinstate it as an absent presence for the audience, the railway tracks of history pointing directly at their heads and hearts, to find new ways to fill out.

Conclusion

The immediately evident differences between Christine Mielitz’s production of Fidelio and Wolfgang Engel’s of Faust can, of course, be partly explained by the utterly different scale, scope, degrees of textual richness and ambiguity of the two works; partly, too, they reflect the different individual styles of their directors. But the two productions also offer case studies in strongly contrasting alternatives of what theatre was and could be during the rapidly changing historical and political circumstances of the ‘Wende’ period. Mielitz’s Fidelio focuses, in a moment of intense political emotions, on the immediate fate of the protesters, and was thus, as we have seen, linked with extraordinary specificity to the days of its premiere on 7 and 8 October 1989. But this premiere took place early enough in the ‘Wende’ period for the remarkable speed and scale of the paradigm shifts of the ‘Wende’ not to influence its form, though they certainly influenced its reception. Engel’s Faust production, which addresses the relationship between the whole socialist project the GDR represented and the humanist aspirations from which it drew its legitimacy, was exposed, throughout most of its rehearsal period, to precisely these paradigm shifts. A theatre production’s survival in the repertoire can rarely be attributed to a single cause and is often at least partly a matter of economics. But productions of a given society’s canonical repertoire are part of that society’s process of engaging with its narratives of collective understanding; and history is, we know, written by the victors. In that light it is paradoxical, perhaps, but all too understandable that while Engel’s critical engagement with a whole historical epoch and the conception of progress that underlay it, is the richer production of the two, semiotically, aesthetically, intellectually, it is the emotional immediacy of Mielitz’s production which has survived in the repertoire, but survived to a large degree as a museal re-enactment (and thus the very opposite) of this immediacy.

Footnotes

¹ ‘Wir treten aus unseren Rollen heraus’. Dokumente des Aufbruchs Herbst ’89, collected by Angela Kuberski (Berlin 1990), p.39. ‘We are stepping out of our roles.’ The version read out from 6 October onwards was a revision of one originally read on 4 October.

² See: Wolfgang Lange, ‘Als fulminantes Zeitstück. Zu Fidelio von Beethoven in Dresden’, Theater der Zeit, 45 (1990), 2, pp.48-50 (p.48); Friedrich Dieckmann, Glockenläuten und offene Fragen. Berichte und Diagnosen aus dem anderen Deutschland (Frankfurt/Main, 1991), p.65.

³ See Herbert Wagner, 20 gegen die SED. Der Dresdner Weg in die Freiheit (Stuttgart & Leipzig, 2000), p.17.

⁴ Figures from Uwe Schwabe, ‘Chronik’, in: Wir bleiben hier. Erinnerungen an den Leipziger Herbst ’89, ed. Thomas Ahbe, Michael Hofmann, Volker Stiehler (Leipzig, 1999), pp.129-228. Figures vary from source to source, but the dramatic rise in participation is unquestionable.

⁵ Karin Urich, Die Bürgerbewegung in Dresden 1989/90 (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2001) offers the definitive account of the events of early October in Dresden, drawn on extensively here. See also: Wagner, 20 gegen die SED, pp.10-19; Thomas Rosenlöcher, Die verkauften Pflastersteine. Dresdner Tagebuch (Frankfurt/Main, 1990), pp.19-27.

⁶ On the MfS and police preparations for ‘Jubiläum 40’, see Armin Mitter & Stefan Wolle (eds.), ‘Ich liebe euch doch alle…’. Befehle und Lagerberichte des MfS. Januar-November 1989 (Berlin 1993), pp.187-89.

⁷ Quoted in Urich, p.177. ‘everything must be nipped in the bud.’

⁸ For example, a three-page statement by Köhler, a Semperoper stage technician, on his arrest and treatment after this Theaterplatz demonstration, is among the papers of Schönfelder, Intendant of the opera, in the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (Sächs. HstA, Staatsoper Dresden, 2. Abgabe, Nr. 16).

⁹ See the numerous examples cited in Joy Haslam Calico, ‘ “Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper”: Opera in the Discourses of Unification and Legitimation in the German Democratic Republic’, in: Music and German National Identity, ed. by Celia Applegate & Pamela Potter (Chicago & London, 2002), p.190-204.

¹⁰ Quoted in Dietrich Staritz, Geschichte der DDR 1949-1985 (Frankfurt/Main, 1985), pp.58-59. ‘the American cultural barbarians and their lackeys’ are using Bonn ‘to trample underfoot Beethoven’s sublime calls for peace and friendship between the peoples’.

¹¹ ‘Zum Beethoven-Jahr 1970’, Musik und Gesellschaft 20 (1970), 2; quoted in David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics 1870-1989 (New Haven & London, 1996), p.181. Despite its title, Dennis’s otherwise thorough account does not mention Mielitz’s production.

¹² See Christoph Dieckmann, ‘Der sterbende Schwan. Berlins Palast der Republik, Symbol des deutschen Umgangs mit Geschichte, wird 25 Jahre alt’, Die Zeit, 19 April 2001, p.72.

¹³ ‘ “Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit – wo gibt es das denn?” Ein Gespräch mit Christine Mielitz’, Semperoper 9 (1995), pp.14-15. ‘They sensed, of course, that something awkward was coming their way. But not one dared actually to ban it.’ See also: ‘ “Wie schlecht die Welt auch ist, es gibt Träume’’: Im Gespräch mit Regisseurin Christine Mielitz’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 7.10.1999; quoted in Urich, p.168.

¹⁴ Dennis, p.27.

¹⁵ Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt/Main, 1959), III, p.1296. ‘Every future storming of the Bastille is inherent in Fidelio.’

¹⁶ See Elisabeth Eleonore Bauer, Wie Beethoven auf den Sockel kam (Stuttgart, 1992), pp.173-201.

¹⁷ Quoted in Dennis, p.138.

¹⁸ Document in the Archives of the Semperoper, dated April 1989 (no explanation for the three-month delay in recording these minutes is given): ‘Every revolution essentially destroys itself. But that does not need to be the case. [...] Doing ‘Fidelio’ today, one cannot hide behind a cloak-and-dagger style production. [...] Pizarro is a secret police officer, someone tied to a particular orientation, who is convinced of his mission. He is not ‘evil’ in an absolute sense, but has rather made himself at home in a terrible place. The Minister does not come from a foreign state, but is part of the state itself. / The piece [the opera] is contemporary and concerns us all [...] We cannot be cowardly; we must say what we must say. Nothing must be swept under the carpet.’

¹⁹ ‘High walls, some in black, some in a concrete texture, grey […] On the revolving stage a watch tower […] Three high walls of wire (concrete pillars with wire fencing stretched between them)’.

²⁰ The set and costumes were designed by Peter Heilein. My remarks on the production’s visual signals are based on photographs from the archives of the Sächsische Staatsoper and a video of the production in the Zentrum für Theaterdokumentation of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

²¹ This is confirmed by all the contemporary reviews; as well as those cited elsewhere in this paper, see e.g. Kerstin Leiße, ‘Vieles ist auf Erden zu tun, tue es bald!’ Union, 12.10.1989; Friedbert Streller, ‘Das Prinzip Hoffnung als Triebkraft des Lebens’, Sächsische Zeitung, 10.10.1989.

²² ‘‘‘Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit – wo gibt es das denn?”’, p.15. ‘that the theatre evening might have come to grief in this direct confrontation with reality’, for if art echoes life too closely, ‘art can simply cease to be.’

²³ Hans Modrow, Ich wollte ein neues Deutschland (Munich, 1999), p.272. ‘That gave us a reason to separate the festivities for the GDR’s birthday from the artistic event. That was unprecedented. Premieres in the Semperoper had hitherto been considered as practically sacred.’

²⁴ See Corey Ross, ‘Staging the East German “working class”: representation and class identity in the “workers’ state” ’, in: Representing the German nation. History and Identity in twentieth-century Germany, ed. Mary Fulbrook & Martin Swales (Manchester, 2000), pp.155-71; Friedrich Dieckmann, Dresdner Ansichten: Spaziergänge und Erkundungen (Frankfurt/Main, 1995), p.23.

²⁵ Modrow, Ich wollte ein neues Deutschland, p.273. ‘Across the Rathausplatz towards the Leningrader Straße a large mass of people were marching with relatively rapid steps, orderly, completely silently, from our framed viewpoint we could see the end of the column neither on the right nor the left. Now other guests at the celebrations came over to the window. Embarrassment. Growing unrest. The reception was effectively over. Now suddenly cries could be heard: ‘We are the people!’ ‘You should be ashamed!’

²⁶ ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, in: Gesammelte Schriften, I/2: Abhandlungen (Frankfurt/Main, 1980), p.701. ‘The French Revolution understood itself as the return of Rome.’

²⁷ On 18 October 1989, the day after he replaced Honecker, and again on 5 November: see Christina Schäffner, ‘Sprache des Umbruchs und ihre Übersetzung’, in: Sprache im Umbruch. Politischer Sprachwandel im Zeichen von ‘Wende’ und ‘Vereinigung’, eds Armin Burkhardt and K.P.Fritsche (Berlin and New York, 1992), pp.135-53 (pp.138-44).

²⁸ ‘ “So konnte es nicht weitergehen.” Redaktionsgespräch mit Wolfgang Berghofer’, Dresdner Hefte. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte 59 (1999), pp.52-59 (p.57). ‘Modrow was in the Semperoper, in the second performance of Fidelio, where the same was happening on stage as on the streets.’

²⁹ ‘Speak softly, be restrained/For we are under surveillance by ears and eyes.’

³⁰ So, at least, Hella Bartnig, ‘Dramaturgin’ at the Semperoper, recalled the moment in an interview with the author on 22 January 2002; see also the version of events offered by Heinz Magirius, Die Semperoper in Dresden (Berlin, 2000), p.303. Martin Walser recalls events slightly differently:‘Dem ersten Auftritt des Chors folgte ein fast den Abend unterbrechenden Beifall. Schräg unter uns, in der Staatsloge, wurde auch geklatscht. Ich glaube, Hans Modrow war dabei.’ Walser: ‘Kurz in Dresden. Einige Szenen aus dem deutschen Frühling im Herbst’, Die Zeit, 20.10.1989, p.74; quoted from the reprinted version in Union, 25.11.1989, p.5. ‘The first chorus was followed by applause which almost stopped the show. Diagonally below us, in the official box, they were clapping too. I think Hans Modrow was amongst them.’ The parallels between Modrow’s and Don Fernando’s response to the pressure of mass opinion, however, remain valid, whichever version is true.

³¹ A point noted in many reviews, e.g. Frank Geißler: ‘Keine Spur von Sentimentalität’, Sächsische Neueste Nachrichten 11.10.1989.

³² www.dresden.citysam.de. ‘The ticket prices include middlemen’s charges and therefore differ markedly from the original price printed on the tickets.’

³³ ‘Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit – wo gibt es das denn?’, p.15.

³⁴ Dieckmann, Glockenläuten, p.66. ‘in Dresden, again, the revolution took place as opera, and the opera as revolution.’

³⁵ ‘Unity: 10 formative years. Tranformed nation adjusts to reality after euphoria of 1990’, Perspectives [Newspaper of the German Embassy, Ottowa], 7 (2000), p.3 at: http://www.germanembassyottowa.org/news/Perspectives/fall2000/unity.html.

³⁶ Quoted from the version in the Sächsische Neueste Nachrichten, 11.11.1989. ‘Let the will of the people be respected! […] They have set out to establish a democratic country, which can and will be a socialist one.’

³⁷ This section is indebted to Ulrich Kühn’s analysis of this production, but focuses more on the relationship to the GDR’s Faustian self-myth: ‘Eine Brust voller Seelen. Faust als DDRIntellektueller auf Identitätssuche’, in: Im Auftrieb. Grenzüberschreitungen mit Goethes “Faust” in Inszenierungen der neunziger Jahre, ed. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Tübingen, 2002), pp.31-62.

³⁸ See Daniel J. Farrelly, Goethe in East Germany 1949-1989. Towards a History of Goethe Reception in the GDR (Columbia, SC, 1998), p.89.

³⁹ Quoted in Deborah Viëtor-Engländer, Faust in der DDR (Frankfurt/Main, New York, Bern, Paris, 1987), p.20. ‘Symbol for a more noble and humane Germany’. The following section is indebted to Viëtor-Engländer’s authoritative study of GDR Faust reception (on and off stage) up to, but not including, Engel’s production. See also Bernd Mahl, Goethes ‘Faust’ auf der Bühne (1806-1998) (Stuttgart, 1998), pp.192-236.

⁴⁰ Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil (Stuttgart 1970), p.208: verse 11580. ‘Standing on freedom’s soil, a people free’. Quotations from Faust will be from this edition and identified by verse numbers in the text; English translations from the version by Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth, 1959).

⁴¹ Kirsten Belgum, Karoline Kirst-Gundersen & Paul Levesque, ‘ “Faust im Braunhemd”: Germanistik and Fascism’, in: Our ‘Faust’. Roots and Ramifications of a Modern German Myth, eds Reinhold Grimm & Jost Hermand (Madison, 1987), pp.153-68 (p.159).

⁴² ‘A marshland flanks the mountainside, /Infecting all that we have gained / Our gain would reach its greatest pride / If all this noisome bog were drained.’

⁴³ ‘Such busy, teeming throngs I long to see, / Standing upon freedom’s soil, a people free. / Then to the moment could I say: / Linger you now, you are so fair! […] Foreknowledge comes, and fills me with such bliss, I take my joy, my highest moment this.’

⁴⁴ Quoted in Viëtor-Engländer, pp.59-61: ‘the third part of Faust could not yet be written […]’ The whole German people ‘will complete this third part of Faust’.

⁴⁵ See e.g. his speech ‘Die Aufgaben der Intelligenz beim Aufbau des Sozialismus in der DDR’ of 27 May 1953, quoted in Viëtor-Engländer, p.154.

⁴⁶ Quoted in Viëtor-Engländer, p.162.

⁴⁷ ‘Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast’: Faust / Part One, translated by Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth 1949), p.67.

⁴⁸ Henriette Harnisch, ‘Variations in the political appropriation of classics in GDR theatre at the time of the collapse of the GDR and the unification of Germany’ (PhD, Sheffield, 2000), pp.206-10, suggests that this aspect of Engel’s production was influenced by Gründgens’s Faust film of 1960.

⁴⁹ According to Eudo C. Mason, Goethe himself sometimes transferred lines between Faust and Mephistopheles; see, for example, Goethe’s Faust: its Genesis and Purport (Berkeley, 1967), p.181.

⁵⁰ Principal source for analysis of the production’s textual and visual aspects: Wolfgang Engel inszeniert Goethes “Faust” am Staatsschauspiel Dresden 1990, dokumentiert von Dieter Görne, 2 volumes (Berlin, 1991), which permits precise study of the cuts and transpositions undertaken by Engel and his dramaturge Görne.

⁵¹ ‘In the end our walls, our ceiling, / Will be ruined, crumbled, reeling’.

⁵² ‘Then to the moment could I say: / Linger you now, you are so fair! […] Foreknowledge comes, and fills me with such bliss, / I take my joy, my highest moment this.’

⁵³ ‘I work that millions may possess this space, / If not secure, a free and active race. […] Such teeming throngs I long to see, / Standing on freedom’s soil, a people free.’

⁵⁴ See Thomas Metscher, ‘Faust’s End: On the Present Significance of Goethe’s Text’, in: Grimm & Hermand, Our ‘Faust’ pp.22-46.

⁵⁵ This section is indebted to Klaus Berghahn, ‘Georg Johann Heinrich Faust: the Myth and its History’, in: Grimm & Hermand, pp.3-21, especially p.19.

⁵⁶ According to Harnisch, p.222, Engel had originally planned to retain Goethe’s final scene, but as a tragic promenade past crucified heroes of human history from Christ through Rosa Luxemburg to the Unknown Soldier, before rejecting this as too heavily symbolic.

⁵⁷ Quoted from Wolfgang Engel inszeniert Goethes ‘Faust’ am Staatsschauspiel Dresden 1990, unpaginated. The four variants translate: ‘Standing on my own soil and property […] Standing on what would truly be my own soil and property […] Standing on what would truly be freedom’s soil and property […] Standing on freedom’s soil, a people free.’

⁵⁸ One of several, of course, including Heiner Müller’s montage of Hamlet and his own Hamletmaschine at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, also in 1990.

⁵⁹ For this reading of Faust as a conservative critique of modernity, see, most recently, Michael Jaeger, “Fausts Kolonie”. Goethes kritische Phänomenologie der Moderne (Würzburg, 2004).

⁶⁰ Quoted from Wolfgang Engel inszeniert Goethes “Faust” am Staatsschauspiel Dresden 1990. ‘It may well be that one could come up with something better. It’s like human life: It has a beginning and an end, but it doesn’t add up to a whole. Gentlemen, be so good as to clap your hands now!’ (my translation: MMcG)

⁶¹ As pointed out by Heinz Klunker, ‘ “Faust international”: Das Staatsschauspiel Dresden nimmt mit Goethes Klassiker Abschied vom DDR-Theater’, Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 7.9.1990, quoted in Wolfgang Engel inszeniert Goethes ‘Faust’ am Staatsschauspiel Dresden 1990, 2, pp.136-38.

⁶² The fact that cutting the final scene also removes Mephistopheles’s ogling of the angels’ buttocks would tend to strengthen the argument that Engel is not seeking facile camp effects.

⁶³ Peter Konwitschny’s production of Handel’s Tamerlan in Halle in April 1990 explored still more directly the gendering of the unification process by underlining the links between masculinity, power and aggression.