Chapter 18 The Romes of Titus Andronicus
In: Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary ResearchSearch for other papers by Manfred Pfister in
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Abstract
This is the success story of a play that had been a palpable hit in its own times, was then vastly under-estimated for centuries, only to be rediscovered after World War ii as an anticipation of the theatre of cruelty and the absurd. This story begins with a number of German reworkings of the play, amongst others by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Heiner Müller, and becomes increasingly politically centred. This process culminated in a recent use of the play in a Polish-German production by Jan Klata in the theatres of Dresden and Wrocław in 2012. Klata’s grotesque spectacle comes at the end of more than half a century of desperate attempts to heal the traumas between Poland and Germany after the carnage of the war. Yet the stereotypes linger on and are easily rekindled, as we are now witnessing in the European crisis over the refugees from the Middle East and Africa.1