Theater als politische Öffentlichkeit. Begriff, Aspekte und eine Fallstudie

In this dissertation, I explore how the link between politics and theatre - which share a common origin in the Attic democracy - is preserved in contemporary Germany, i.e., whether theatre still serves as a “political public sphere” (the overall title of the thesis). In order to do so, the notions of “public sphere” and “the political” are thoroughly defined by revising useful elements provided by sociological and political theory. Following Habermas and other German authors, I understand “public sphere” as a network consisting of “arenas” (speakers) and “galleries” (audiences) who produce discourses and presentations and react to them, with part of the production occuring non-publicly “backstage”. While political publics frame their dis-courses as related to contentious issues of the polity, cultural publics concentrate on the for-mal aspects of presentation and on the emotive interface between the individual and society (“cathexis” in Parsonian terms). Political communication, more specifically, is understood here as discourse which relates (1) to the polity and (2) to what is good or bad for it, presenting arguments in a (3) pluralistic way, and with (4) potential polarization regarding the different alternatives. Hannah Arendt’s view on the political sphere is a central inspiration for criterion [3], noting that there is a tension between this plural exchange of perspectives and the polarization criterion, which leads to diffcult trade-offs. As an antonym, “consumerist” communication is only related to indi-vidual preferences and indifferent to arguments and normative alternatives. “Ritualism”, on the other hand, is akin to the political, but lacks the decisive feature of pluralism. The terrain for the empirical study is then paved by looking at exemplary stations of occi-dental theatre, namely the Athenian, the Elizabethan, and finally the German national theatre of the 19th century. The increasing ritualism of the latter is seen as the normative ancestor of contemporary state-subsidized staging in the Federal Republic of Germany. Among the different types of theatres to be found here, the typical “Municipal Theatre” is singled out as a public of local reach and importance (distinguished, e.g., from the “Metropolitan Theatre” with nation-wide frames and impacts). The discussions in that section make clear that the case study carried out in “Mittelstadt” is a typical one in many respects. The case study, operationalizing “the public” and “political communication” through a semi-quantitative content analysis of interviews (with producers and audience members) as well as of PR-related texts, finds clear evidence for both actual pluralistic discourse and reference to society, and - even stronger - for normative striving toward such kind of discourse. The “productive structure” of the Municipal Theatre imposes certain constraints on the reali-zation of said normativity, though, which result in shortcomings of dialogue and lacking of necessary knowledge about the communication partner (mostly about the audience in the case of producers). A missing centrality of the actual theatrical piece, the presentation, within the audience’s discourse is a particularly critical finding. In the very last section, however, I put the overall positive findings of the case study into perspective. Firstly, I question whether the virtual ‘withdrawal’ of ritualistic elements can be assessed as entirely beneficial for the effectiveness of theatre as a cultural and political sphere (which re-opens the debate on the possibility and conditions for a “linguification of the Sacred” found in Durkheim and Habermas). Secondly, I make the point that the act of demonstration, of “showing” something - located at the heart of theatrical representation - harbours a specific political potential, but only if it is understood and received as a speech act in need of public interpretation. Thirdly, I reconsider the often noted tension between an in-depth elaboration of issues, on the one hand, and the inclusion of ever more topics and voices, on the other. While this tension is inherent to every public and not really dissolvable, in contemporary German theatre it might be advisable to emphasize the “Bildungsauftrag”, the mandate for aesthetic in-depth education, instead of striving for an overproduction of discursive offer-ings and activities.