Mobilities, Transfers and Receptions
Gesa zur Nieden
During the 1930s to the 1950s, music theatres in the German speaking area underwent complex and manifold changes due to political alignments and the following mobilities of musical actors and transfers of repertoire. The aim of the research project is to investigate the relations and tensions between local orientations and national thinking to describe the aesthetic networks of popular music theatre and their functioning during the national socialist regime.
On the basis of the cooperation of state and municipal music theatre institutions (especially Stuttgart, Hamburg, Leipzig and Schwerin) with publishing houses and the reception of the corresponding productions, keywords of popular music theatre and its social as well as cultural spectrum of meanings will be analyzed. A special focus will be laid on the term “kulturell hochstehend” (culturally high level) that was put forward after the end of the second world war to establish a theatre practice removed from national socialist thinking but for more or less the same audiences.