eJournals Colloquia Germanica 55/1-2

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
71
2023
551-2

Staging Justice: Trials and the Law on the German Stage

71
2023
Matthew Bell
Daniele Vecchiato
cg551-20001
Staging Justice: Trials and the Law on the German Stage 1 Staging Justice: Trials and the Law on the German Stage Matthew Bell and Daniele Vecchiato King’s College London / Università degli Studi di Padova This special issue of Colloquia Germanica focuses on the representation of justice, trials, and legal processes in German theater and performance from the late eighteenth century to the present day, exploring representative examples of the manifold ways in which literature reflects on the performative nature of justice, especially when it is written to be performed on the stage� Theater plays and legal processes-especially trials-share affinities on many levels� Some of these, like the presence of a live audience and the use of stage props and costumes such as wigs and gowns, may seem obvious, but it is only in recent Law and Literature scholarship that the symmetries between the legal and the theatrical sphere have been systematically addressed and problematized� As Alan Read points out in his insightful volume Theatre & Law from 2016, foremost characteristics of the law include that it “has to be seen to be done” (Read 8) and, just like other forms of performance, it is “constituted through a conscious act of ‘showing doing’ involving some form of agent and some form of audience” (9). Furthermore, both trials and plays occur in a specific time and place, and are therefore characterized by a sense of “present-ness” and “liveness” (14); they both consist of acting and spectating, of language and gestures as well as mental operations, and they are both concerned with processing and understanding human experience (11—12)� Both judicial and theatrical spectacles follow an Aristotelian narrative structure with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, and they operate simultaneously as acts of fiction and reality, with all parties involved having “to agree to the status of the event for it to be viable and function” (13)� From the perspective of literature, the theatricality of the law is fascinating for its ritualized orchestration of roles and activities, for its moments of conflict, suspense, revelation, and for the expectation of a wise and just judgment that can produce a sense of satisfaction similar to that offered by a happy ending. Furthermore, legal judgment can to some extent be compared to the aesthetic judgment expressed by the recipients of a play (see Wihstutz), adding a further layer of complexity in the debate on the exchanges between the legal and the 2 Matthew Bell and Daniele Vecchiato literary system� Finally, legal and theatrical performance often share a common pedagogical or critical function, as they rely on their respective abilities to sensitize the spectators (i�e�, the citizens) to urgent moral questions or to raise their awareness on the mechanisms of justice and, more broadly, of the society they live in� While the rituals and practices of justice have proved immensely productive for the theater space since antiquity, 1 it is only in recent years that concepts such as “performativity” and “theatricality” have been acknowledged as part of legal processes, becoming increasingly prominent in a number of theoretical writings on the law� 2 In general, legal institutions and practices seem to have an ambivalent relation to their pronounced theatrical nature: on the one hand, law uses performative tools to reconstruct (and, to all effects, stage) a past event and judge upon its lawfulness or unlawfulness, as Cornelia Vismann has argued in her seminal work Medien der Rechtsprechung of 2011 (esp� 19—71)� On the other, while investigating the truth through language and performance, the law necessarily resorts to “acts of surrogation and symbolic substitution” (Stone Peters, “Law as Performance” 206) that may confer to that same truth a patina of fictionality. For this reason, the law is also tempted to repudiate its inherent theatricality, in order to assert its legitimacy: Exploiting its performance medium, law may sometimes aspire to the power of theater: its pomp and ceremony, its masquerades, its spectacular effects, its manipulation of the passions, its electric connection to the crowd of spectators� At other times it may revile, rebuke, or disavow its own latent theatricality: enact its opposition to legal histrionics, […] refuse to allow law to become a “circus,” “carnival,” “theater and spectaculum�” (Stone Peters, “Law as Performance” 206—07) That the law seeks to mask its affinity with fiction and performance-an affinity that may be perceived as embarrassing-is not surprising� Even though they represent two of the most salient and engaging aspects of human experience, the legal and the literary spheres tend to remain separated� Of course, law is not literature and literature is not law� Yet there should be a place where they can converse, and where the crossing of disciplinary and epistemological boundaries becomes fruitful. To reflect on the law, its practices, and even its predicaments through the lens of literature, and to stage legal processes in extra-legal contexts allows readers and spectators to gain a more thorough understanding of ethics, politics, and human relations in general� Literature has the potential to train society to acknowledge the law as part of the fabric of a properly functioning polity and to make legal practices intelligible to and palatable for citizens of all backgrounds� Staging Justice: Trials and the Law on the German Stage 3 In the German-speaking lands, reflections on the functioning of the law have repeatedly been integrated into dramatic texts, especially-but not exclusively- through the staging of trial, interrogation, and punishment scenes� Prominent examples include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), Heinrich von Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug (1808), Peter Weiss’ Die Ermittlung (1965), as well as more recent endeavours, such as Andres Veiel’s Der Kick (2006), Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror (2016), and Milo Rau’s re-enactments� This can partly be explained by the remarkably large presence of legally trained authors (the so-called Dichterjuristen ) 3 in German literary history, but also by an intense theoretical reflection on the connection between the aesthetic and political roles of theater. This reflection was arguably inaugurated by Friedrich Schiller’s concept of the “Gerichtsbarkeit der Bühne” ( NA 20, 92) within his theorization of theater as a moral institution ( Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken? , 1784), and continued-though with radically different premises-in Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator’s early twentieth-century idea of a “politisches Theater,” an idea that was highly influential throughout the twentieth century and is still echoed in today’s demand of German theater for political and social relevance (see Brauneck)� By discussing and analyzing the multiple ways in which representative plays have encouraged reflections on legal processes and the institution of law on the German-language stage, this special issue of Colloquia Germanica sets out to examine how literary discourses on justice have evolved in different historical and epistemological contexts. In particular, it seeks to define and assess how law is interpreted and applied in the texts, how the relations between law, society and power are outlined, and to what extent the staging of trials serves as a dramaturgic tool to comment on (and possibly criticize) contemporary legal and judicial practices� Adding to the dynamic conversation about the interactions between the literary and the legal sphere in the Germanophone context 4 and building on the performative turn in recent Law and Literature scholarship, the collected contributions offer in-depth textual analyses of exemplary courtroom dramas in historical and comparative perspective� They also address more general aspects, such as the (a)symmetries between the dramatic urgency of legal processes and performance, the role of the spectator, the relations between fiction and reality, and the strategies with which authors and theater practitioners foster a reflection on societal issues and current political debates� The papers, which cover both canonical and lesser-studied authors and works, are organized in chronological order, thus offering a coherent picture of the development of legal discourses in German drama from the Age of Goethe 4 Matthew Bell and Daniele Vecchiato to the twenty-first century. The first two contributions focus on prominent dramas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a time characterized by the extensive exploration of legal themes in literature (see Zeuch; Bell/ Vecchiato)� Matthew Bell analyzes Goethe’s play Die natürliche Tochter (1803) from a legal perspective, contextualizing it within French inheritance law before and during the French Revolution and Goethe’s own proto-conservative idea of the law� Stefania Sbarra explores Kleist’s representation of guilt, innocence, and rehabilitation in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1810) and attempts an intertextual comparison with Goethe’s Faust. Ein Fragment (1790), in which questions of judgment and punishment are illustrated by the so-called ‘Gretchen tragedy�’ The following two articles examine prominent dramas of the nineteenth century� Sophia Clark addresses questions of publicness and orality by investigating the different forms and functions of the stage direction of “applause” in the trial scenes of Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod (1835), one of the last important plays before what Helmut Schanze has termed the “Lücke des Dramas von Hebbel bis Hauptmann” (Schanze 1)� Deconstructing the narrative of the supposed gap in dramatic production in the second half of the nineteenth century, Ben Schofield explores the legal and political significance of Gustav Freytag’s Die Journalisten (1852), indicating a shift in the representation of justice and morality from the courtroom to new settings of public and social debate-in Freytag’s case, the press� The fifth and sixth contributions explore two defining milestones of German theater of the twentieth century, namely the theory and practice of Brecht’s epic theater and the documentary plays of the 1960s. Laura Bradley offers a survey of how justice-or rather injustice-is shown in Brecht’s trial scenes throughout his oeuvre, and focuses especially on the role of the audience and its critical activation in Die Maßnahme (1930)� Benjamin Wihstutz describes the switch from fiction to historical depth and documentation in the genre of courtroom drama in the 1960s, focusing in particular on Peter Weiss’ concept of documentary theater and relating Die Ermittlung both to Hannah Arendt’s notion of truth and judgment and to today’s debates on memory culture� The last two contributions are devoted to contemporary (post-2000) plays and performances, offering fresh insights into the newest developments in the presentation of legal questions in German-speaking theater� Daniele Vecchiato investigates the role of the spectator in two plays that expressly thematize the theatricality of legal processes, namely the controversial courtroom drama Terror by Ferdinand von Schirach, and Rimini Protokoll’s Zeugen! Ein Strafkammerspiel (2004), which brought experts of justice from the Berlin-Moabit criminal court onto the stage. Richard McClelland finally explores the theatricality and performativity of the law as well as the relationship between fiction and reality Staging Justice: Trials and the Law on the German Stage 5 in Milo Rau’s play Die Zürcher Prozesse (2013), which interrogates the limits of free speech and the role of the press in contemporary Switzerland� This issue brings together both established and emerging voices from an unusually broad range of disciplines, including German Studies, Law and Literature, and Theater and Performance Studies� It employs a correspondingly wide variety of critical approaches that testify to the productiveness of interdisciplinary and comparative cultural studies� It presents and assesses some of the most recent developments in the field of German Law and Literature. In particular, it draws attention to the importance of the political contexts of legal debates and the political meanings of theatrical interventions concerning the law� Another key focus is the active role of audiences, both as participants in actual theatrical productions and as portrayed on the stage� It considers the universal nature of the questions and challenges posed by the texts examined here-which are indeed historically situated, and yet have the power of intersecting contemporary debates� Finally, it investigates dramas that have not previously been studied from the perspective of the law, including both contemporary works and plays from the nineteenth century. In doing so, it substantially broadens the field of Law and Literature in German Studies� 5 Notes 1 The representation of trials and legal questions has a remarkable and well-studied tradition in the history of drama, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, to modern and contemporary forms of courtroom or investigative plays� 2 On this aspect, see Stone Peters, “Legal Performance�” For further contributions on the performative aspects of the law, see Goodrich and, for a German perspective, Münkler and Schwarte� 3 The term Dichterjurist was first introduced in the 1950s by German legal historian Eugen Wohlhaupter� In recent years, it has become of common use in literary studies as well (see Weber and Nilges, among others)� 4 Cf� among others Ziolkowski and Beebee� See also the activities of the recently instituted Sonderforschungsbereich “Recht und Literatur” (SFB 1385) at the University of Münster and especially its subproject “Schau-Prozesse� Inszenierungen des Rechts als soziale Praxis,” which focuses on the role of theatrical production for the construction of legal, political, and social meaning� 5 With the exception of Stefania Sbarra’s and Sophia Clark’s contributions, the papers were first presented and discussed at the international conference Staging Justice. Trials and the Law on the German Stage , held at King’s 6 Matthew Bell and Daniele Vecchiato College London in November 2019� The conference and the present publication were conceived in the framework of the research project VehmeLit - Legal Cultures and Literary Trials in the Age of Goethe , which was carried out between 2018 and 2019 at the Department of German at King’s College London� The project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No� 744413� Works Cited Beebee, Thomas O� Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature � New York: Continuum, 2012� Bell, Matthew, and Daniele Vecchiato, eds� “Legal Cultures in the Age of Goethe�” Special Issue of Law and Literature 34�2 (2022)� Brauneck, Manfred� Die Deutschen und ihr Theater. Kleine Geschichte der “moralischen Anstalt” oder: Ist das Theater überfordert? Bielefeld: transcript, 2018� Goodrich, Peter� “Specters of Law: Why the History of the Legal Spectacle Has Not Been Written�” U.C. Irvine Law Review 1�3 (2011): 773—81� Münkler, Laura� “Inszenierung von Recht als Wirksamkeitsbedingung� Warum und wie Recht inszenieren? ” Inszenierung von Recht. Funktionen - Modi - Interaktionen � Ed� Laura Münkler and Julia Stenzel� Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2019� 19—40� Nilges, Yvonne, ed� Dichterjuristen. Studien zur Poesie des Rechts vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert � Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014� Piscator, Erwin� Das politische Theater � Berlin: Schultz, 1929� Read, Alan� Theatre and Law � London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015� Schanze, Helmut� Drama im bürgerlichen Realismus (1850-1890): Theorie und Praxis. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973� Schiller, Friedrich� Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe � Ed� Julius Petersen, Hermann Schneider et al� Weimar: Böhlau, 1953-� Schwarte, Ludger� “Legitimation durch Inszenierung? Ästhetische, mediale und politische Bedingungen der Rechtsprechung�” Inszenierung von Recht. Funktionen - Modi - Interaktionen � Ed� Laura Münkler and Julia Stenzel� Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2019� 125—45� Stone Peters, Julie� “Legal Performance Good and Bad�” Law, Culture and the Humanities 4 (2008): 179—200� ---� “Law as Performance� Historical Interpretation, Objects, Lexicons, and Other Methodological Problems�” New Directions in Law and Literature � Ed� Elizabeth S� Anker and Bernadette Meyler� Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017� 193—209� Vismann, Cornelia� Medien der Rechtsprechung � Ed� Alexandra Kemmerer and Markus Krajewski� Frankfurt am Main: S� Fischer, 2011� Staging Justice: Trials and the Law on the German Stage 7 Wihstutz, Benjamin� “Gerichtsbarkeit: Über politisches und ästhetisches Urteilen im Theater�” Recht fühlen � Ed� Sigrid Köhler, Sabine Müller-Mall, Florian Schmidt and Sandra Schnädelbach� Paderborn: Fink, 2017� 81—93� Weber, Hermann, ed� Dichter als Juristen. Recht, Literatur und Kunst in der Neuen Juristischen Wochenschrift � Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004� Wohlhaupter, Eugen� Dichterjuristen � Ed� Horst G� Seifert� 3 vols� Tübingen: Mohr, 1953-1957� Zeuch, Ulrike� “Recht und Literatur um 1800 im Kontext des law and literature movement �” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 31�1 (2006): 77—84� Ziolkowski, Theodore� The Mirror of Justice. Literary Reflections of Legal Crises � Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997�