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Soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Nazi Brownshirts gathered outside the German National Theater in Weimar. With a great show of force, they removed a plaque commemorating the Weimar constitution, signed there in 1919; a photograph captures the event. Other changes took place inside the theater. The Intendant (the artistic and managing director) was dismissed, replaced by someone more acceptable to the new regime, just as his predecessor, Carl von Schirach, father of future Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, had been summarily sacked after the November Revolution fourteen years before. Von Schirach's experience was not unusual. Under the new democratic government, Germany's theaters were effectively purged of their Intendanten, leaving behind shattered careers and embittered opponents of the new republic. Gerwin Strobl's The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933-1945 begins by examining this process, which the Nazis then reversed after 1933. His excellent study is the first book-length account in English devoted to the German stage under Nazism.
Chapter one challenges the existent, rather hagiographic accounts of the Weimar stage ("the Glory That Was Weimar"), which tend to remain silent about the expulsion of theater professionals after 1918 (p. 17). Strobl examines the consequences of those...