Shakespeare under Different Flags: The Bard in German Classrooms from Hitler to Honecker

This article contributes to the study of Shakespeare’s appropriation inGermany during the twentieth century, with a particular focus on its twoauthoritarian regimes: the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic.Germans have had their very own ‘German’ Shakespeare since the eighteenthcentury. Goethe and Schiller, among others, claimed the playwright for theirprojects of literary (and national) self-assertion. Ideologues in the Third Reichand the GDR conscripted this already ‘naturalized’ Shakespeare for thepurposes of ideological education, and even hailed a new era in the appreciationof his work. Under the swastika, teachers were encouraged to studyShakespeare’s Führerfiguren, as well as his anticipation of the racial concernsof National Socialism. In classrooms of the GDR, the emphasis shifted toShakespeare’s humanism and realism, from which, students learned, contemporarysocialist literature had evolved. The plays were now read as critical andoptimistic responses to a social and political reality defined by class struggle