Theatre on Trial: Staging Postwar Justice in the United States and Germany
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation studies the interchange between political theatre and postwar political trials. I argue that to an extraordinary extent, theatre history in this period is inextricable from trial history. Through close archival study of mid-century theatre productions including Bertolt Brecht's 1954 production of "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" and the fifteen simultaneous premiere productions of Peter Weiss's "The Investigation" in 1965, I show how directors and playwrights looked to legal trials in order to develop and articulate theories of epic and documentary theatre, and how this new theatre in turn sought to effect justice in ways that trials alone could not.
abstract: This dissertation studies the interchange between political theatre and postwar political trials. I argue that to an extraordinary extent, theatre history in this period is inextricable from trial history. Through close archival study of mid-century theatre productions including Bertolt Brecht's 1954 production of "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" and the fifteen simultaneous premiere productions of Peter Weiss's "The Investigation" in 1965, I show how directors and playwrights looked to legal trials in order to develop and articulate theories of epic and documentary theatre, and how this new theatre in turn sought to effect justice in ways that trials alone could not.
author: Arjomand, Minou
language: English
keywords: Trials (Political crimes and offenses), Trials in literature, German drama, Theater--Political aspects, Theater, German literature, Comparative literature, Kaukasische Kreidekreis (Brecht, Bertolt), Ermittlung (Weiss, Peter)
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:29Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D8VM4BK8