Towards a historical poetics: Naturalist theater, bourgeois family, and the historical culture of late nineteenth-century Germany

Naturalist Theater provides a significant, and heretofore, largely ignored investigative domain for the examination of late nineteenth-century historical culture in Germany. Arising in the last two decades of the century, Naturalist Theater represented a unique borderline phenomenon that straddled the Enlightenment-oriented praxis of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as the dawning modernity of the twentieth century. This distinctive status allows Naturalist Theater to serve as a crucible of German society at the Jahrhundertwende, making manifest the spatial, temporal, and narrative frameworks that constituted German culture. Above all, it illuminates historical culture; or, how fin de siècle German culture articulated a consciousness toward the discursive realm of history, the historical, and the past. An interdisciplinary foundation is required for such a project and this entails a reformulation and extension of existing scholarship on German Naturalism. Such a reorganization spans the distinctions between theater and drama, Naturalist Theater and Naturalism, the cultural domains of the bourgeois family, a sophisticated understanding of the parameters of historical culture, and the theatrical work of (among others) Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Sudermann, Max Halbe, Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf, Otto Brahm, Max Reinhardt, and Frank Wedekind. The cultural optic granted by Naturalist Theater would, by itself, be significant, but is doubly significant for fin de siècle German culture, for it was during this era that the first significant fissures in modern historical consciousness and culture began to emerge. Traditionally this crisis has been examined through modernist literature; Naturalist Theater is either never discussed or relegated to an inferior status due, primarily, to the reductive view of its aesthetic program as one of mere verisimilitude. This project challenges such a bias and provides an alternative viewpoint. Naturalist Theater allows access to the world beyond mere text and criticism and permits entry into the proxemic, kinesic, deictic, and linguistic world of cultural performance. Hence, Naturalist Theater proves indispensable for any inquiry into, any historical poetics of, late nineteenth-century German historical culture