Living in Emergency: The Response of New German Documentary Theater

Abstract

Late twentieth and early twenty-first century German documentary theater occupies a paradoxical position between aesthetic artifact and factual report. Much work in the genre thematizes exceptional historical and social phenomena which may fairly be considered emergencies. Documentary theater by its nature problematizes the boundary between fiction and fact as well as that between report and material event. The theatrical mediation of documented event as implicit explication of larger issues enjoins a cognitive response in reception. This response, if a serious consideration of a matter thought important by the audience will necessarily require an individual orientation to that issue reflecting one's deeper values and sense of self, defining one's position in relation to said issue. We propose that much German documentary theater may be meaningfully explored as the nexus of concepts of emergency, materiality, theatrical mediation, and reception. The paper is structured as (1) an overview of issues, (2) introduction of concepts, (3) a short historical survey of German documentary theater, and (4 and 5) a comparative discussion of a classic and a contemporary work (Verdicts) in terms of the problematics. Methodology reflects the author's synthesis of several theoretical perspectives by among others, Agamben, Bakhtin, de Beauvoir, and Foucault. We conclude that documentary theater synthesizes, as a mechanism of reception, narrativization of material events into an enacted dramatical discourse that challenges audience perspective on and re-construction of, the material referents of documentation.