Refusing the End of History: The Politics and Aesthetics of Castorf's Volksbhne

From 1992 to 2017, the cultural landscape of Berlin was contested and shaped by the Volksbhne under its artistic director, Frank Castorf. Throughout his tenure, Castorf refused the liberal democratic consensus euphorically proclaimed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He made his theatre a space for working through the collapse of socialism and Fukuyamas end of history. Castorfs responses to postsocialismhis contouring of the historic theatre institution and his stagecraftconstituted a refusal of the dominant narrative of history and are the focus of this dissertation. I show how Castorf transformed the dogmatic state-funded theatre into a venue for radical politics and avant-garde aesthetics. During the fractious post-Wende period and beyond, Castorf played a public role as polemicist, cultural diagnostician, and prognosticator. At the nexus between the extreme Right and Left, Castorf mined for critiques of liberal democracy and linear narratives of progress. With Jnger and Schmitt on the Right, and Benjamin, Mller and iek on the Left, Castorfs intellectual genealogy is woven from a promiscuous engagement of Marx and Nietzsche. Castorf used the theatre and these traditions of intellectual thought to channel the wide-spread ressentiment, disorientation and hopelessness wrought by the demise of the Eastern Bloc and rapid Westernization. For Castorf, the only way to deal with these discontents was to shed light upon the temptations of illiberal reaction on behalf of those individuals disenchanted with post-Wende society. Here, Castorf drew a strong parallel to Berlin in the 1920s, focusing specifically on Conservative Revolutionary thought and events in and around the historic Volksbhne. The same dark forces lurking on the horizon of Weimar Germany inform Castorfs reception of the present in his dramaturgy. The dissertation develops chronologically and establishes three stages of Castorfs theory-praxis relationship: the mania of the 1990s; the melancholy of his Russian Turn in the early 2000s, and the foregrounding of epic and political theatre strategies coinciding with the 2008 financial crisis. His productions were anarchic events that turned the dramatic canon into occasions for satire, slapstick, digression and ultimately ambivalence. Creating openings, Castorf revived forgotten local and site-specific histories that he hoped would revitalize a proletarian consciousness. Refusing closure, this dissertation makes the case for Castorfs Volksbhne as an archive for an alternative socialist imaginary, conveying the utopian spirit of what the GDR might have been.