Shakespeare is German

Unveiling of the Shakespeare Monument in Weimar in 1904. Img: Public Domain

I’m having a very British afternoon. I’m sitting on a train. Heavy winds are beating sheets of rain against the window, blurring the fields as they roll by. A cheerful lady has just arrived with the refreshments trolley. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, my lovely?’ I do. And some shortbread, please. I’m in an excellent mood, excited to get to my destination, which is also very British. I’m off to London’s West End to see William Shakespeare’s Macbeth starring David Tennant And Cush Jumbo.

Viewed from another angle, my afternoon may also be rather German. The country of my birth is absolutely obsessed with Shakespeare, so my excitement about seeing Macbeth is probably rooted in the way I was brought up rather than stemming from the anglophilia I developed in my mid-teens. 

The first time I read a Shakespeare play in its entirety was in German lessons at school in Germany. England’s most famous poet is considered such an intrinsic part of Germany’s literary canon, that he is a set item on the school curriculum. We started with Romeo and Juliet, which we read in translation and later added A Midsummer Night's Dream, as I recall. 

I think the first time I read Macbeth was actually in the original in English lessons – a torturous experience since the vocabulary and syntax are so difficult to comprehend when you’re only just learning English as a second language.

I watched Roman Polanski’s 1971 film in the hope that it would help me get the plot lines in order and ended up being utterly enthralled by the raw violence of it – both that inherent to the play and specifically that in Polanski’s film. I found out only later that the director had used this work to process the brutal murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate. It was one of the first memorable instances for me when I realised how deeply literature and art can resonate across the centuries. 

Stage performances of Shakespeare also burnt themselves into my young mind. I was still a child when my parents took me along to Neuzelle Abbey, a Cistercian monastery founded in the Middle Ages, not far from where I grew up, east of Berlin. In its ivy-clad courtyard, we watched a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I recall this as quite a magical experience. It was indeed a warm summer night and the play happened all around, with creatures popping out from behind columns or from somewhere behind the audience. 

Later, at university in Jena, I remember watching a spectacular performance of The Tempest where the whole stage had been transformed into an island complete with palm trees, special effects and fire. 

It’s not like I sought these things out. As a nation, Germans are so obsessed with Shakespeare that he remains the most-played author on the country’s stages with more performances each year than in England.

When Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was reconstructed on the south bank of the Thames in London, its first full-length production in 1993 was The Merry Wives of Windsor performed by the German Bremer Shakespeare Company. 

The Globe gets more students from Germany than from any other country apart from Britain itself. When I took my Mutti there earlier this year, she was all too happy to watch a performance of Romeo and Juliet in English because she knew the play so well that it didn’t matter if she didn’t understand every word.

In 2010 The Globe played to the deep German affection for Shakespeare by putting on a whole season under the theme ‘Shakespeare is German’. Then-director Patrick Spottiswoode also hosted a BBC Radio 4 programme on this in 2012.

Germany’s affinity with Shakespeare goes back a long way. I come across it all the time in my research around Weimar 1919-1939. One of my subjects, for instance, reflects in his diary on a performance of Hamlet at what had then become the German National Theatre when the new German constitution had been crafted at what had previously been Weimar’s court theatre.

But Shakespeare also played a huge role in the discussions of the arch-conservative Weimar elites and their increasing angst for the erosion of the canon of German culture and literature of which they considered Shakespeare to be a part.

This also goes back a long way. Shakespeare’s plays were already enacted in German-speaking areas of Europe during his lifetime, mostly staged by touring theatres and later through short adaptations rather than direct translations. Complex translations appeared in the 18th and 19th centuries. Andrea Wulf gives a great account of August and Caroline Schlegel’s work on Shakespeare translations in Jena her Magnificient Rebels. 

To this day, there is a Shakespeare memorial in Weimar, right in the town that many consider Germany’s literary heart. The German Shakespeare Society was founded in Weimar, too, in 1864 – on the occasion of the 300th birthday of the poet. It is one of the oldest literary societies in Europe that is still active today. During Germany’s division after the Second World War, when Weimar ended up in the East, a new West German branch was founded in Bochum. The two societies were reunited after German reunification in 1993. 

East Germany continued the Shakespeare traditions just as much as West Germany did. The British poet remained a firm part of the literary canon on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There was never any doubt about this in the East. As Armin-Gerd Kuckhoff, an influential theatre scholar of the GDR put it in 1970: ‘That Shakespeare’s work is “heritage”, that is part of the most valuable achievements of mankind, appears self-evident to us and needs to confirmation.’ The GDR’s 68 theatres staged more performances of his plays than those of Germany’s most famous poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Adolf Hitler also owned a translation of Shakespeare’s collected works and was said to have quoted from it often. The Nazis banned many other non-German playwrights in their attempt to Germanise culture but not Shakespeare since he had already become part of the German literary tradition. They did, however, ensure that his plays were shown in a way that they approved of. This is particularly true for The Merchant of Venice which features the Jewish money lender Shylock who is a complex character in the original play. Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Theatre Chamber made several alterations to the script in order to turn Shylock into their idea of a stereotypical Jew. He became a grotesque, demonic caricature in Nazi productions. Nonetheless, it is telling that not even the Nazis regarded Shakespeare as a foreign playwright but part of the German literary tradition. 

In that spirit, I raise my cup of tea to William Shakespeare, a poet so important to both the countries I consider home. I can’t wait for those witches to brew up their toil and trouble in London tonight in front of at least one appreciative German in the audience.