Night of the Living Dead: Elektra, 1903
Guest post: Dr. S.E. Jackson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Gertrud Eysoldt as Elektra in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. Kleines Theater, Berlin, 1903. Reproduction by Max Reinhardt Archive and Library. Binghamton University Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives. Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York.
Although modernist theatre had been the talk of the town for over a decade already, Berlin audiences and culture critics were still not prepared for October 1903. In the space of a few weeks, the Deutsches Theater company, now under the direction of Max Reinhardt, premiered Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1891),[1] which conservative critics decried as a perverse display, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Rose Bernd (1903), which defied a century-long tradition of high tragedy in German infanticide dramas, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1903), which quite literally stunned audiences into silence. These three productions brought the clash between modernists and conservatives to the fore as critics made their allegiances clear in the reviews that flooded Berlin’s print media that fall. For German theatre traditionalists, these plays and their productions were exemplars of modern decadence, led by its standard-bearers: homosexuals, Jews, and deviant women.
In a contest for the most frenzied critical responses, it would be difficult to declare a winner from among these three productions. Decadence features prominently in criticism of each, sometimes as a matter of fact, but in many cases as a dog whistle for those who feared the German theatre’s seemingly inevitable path to ruin: the death of a noble tradition, as it were. In that sense, Elektra – written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, directed by Max Reinhardt, and starring Gertrud Eysoldt – inspired particularly strong reactions because it claimed a sacrosanct genealogy, and because the production and performance changed the rules of engagement between audience and stage so forcefully. I am also interested in looking at decadence in the 1903 Elektra here because it agitated some prominent theatre critics to engage with a striking theme: zombies.
Hofmannsthal wrote Elektra for Reinhardt and Eysoldt specifically, and the three collaborated closely on the production. The poet, director, and actress were thus co-conspirators in transforming Sophocles’ Electra, and Electra, into an unmitigated encounter with decadence for theatregoers. The drama drew immediate accusations of decadence because of the pointed themes of psychological and sexual aberration, more specifically in the lead female characters,[2] and Hofmannsthal’s excessively descriptive, sensual language. Critics had also long since marked Reinhardt and Eysoldt as shameless decadents. More broadly, decadence had been essentially attached to modernist developments in German theatre at least since the naturalists had come into prominence. The naturalists and those who came after them shifted focus from “high” to “low” characters and content; they made protagonists of alcoholics, prostitutes and other criminals, and other ‘aberrant’ characters; and they quite intentionally deconstructed long-held aesthetic ideals.[3] In these ways – and of course with the prominence of Jews, women, and other identified undesirables at the helm – the modernists solidified the connection between decadence and degeneracy, a correlation that found widespread purchase with the popularity and influence of Max Nordau’s famous tome Entartung [Degeneration] (1892/93). What is particularly interesting for my analysis here is that in the sum of its parts (and in its most biological sense), Ent-art-ung more literally means ‘denaturing’, that is, the distancing from or undoing of the nature of a thing. Entartung is thus only recognizable if the natural state of a thing is still visible in, or behind, or through its altered state. This contributes to the uncanny power of the degenerate. And what could fit under this definition more than a zombie? And what art could enact this understanding of decadence as degeneration as denaturing more acutely than live theatre? The potential to experience decadent theatre as the theatre’s very de-naturing must also be considered in terms of how radically new modernist theatre practice and performance were for viewers in the early twentieth century, and how that novelty amplified the impacts of their production and performance techniques.[4] If nothing else, to be modernist was to be new, and, more controversially, to defy tradition and expectation.
Hofmannsthal therefore incited heated debate for and against the 1903 Elektra by writing his drama as a modernist, decadent tragedy. After all, the poet had provoked critics by including the subtitle, ‘frei nach Sophokles’ [freely adapted from Sophocles], and then working with Reinhardt to create an anti-classicist production design and Eysoldt to enact Elektra as a ferociously modern woman on the stage. The critic for the Berliner Börsen-Kurier announced: ‘Classicism in contact with decadence and Ms. Eysoldt as the goddess of revenge, as Elektra!’[5] Adapting, even updating the classics was not a crime in and of itself; indeed, there was a venerable tradition of German classicism, but it had standards and limits. Turning Sophocles into a decadent was a clear violation of the rules. Karl Strecker surmises in his review for the Tägliche Rundschau that in order to connect Hofmannsthal’s drama to its identified forebear, ‘one would have to be of the opinion that Sophocles was a perverse decadent of the twenty first century, Electra (in German ‘the radiant one’) a rabid beast, a brutish animal, a sadist killed by her own aberration’.[6] Sophocles, along with the other Attic greats, was a pillar of the past on which to build a noble German tradition, not a revenant to reanimate on the modern/ist stage. As the critic for the Tilsiter Zeitung insisted: ‘The entire Berlin press is outraged about the misusage of Sophocles’ drama by the Viennese neurasthenic poet’.[7]
This is where I confess that no critics actually mention ‘zombies’ in their reviews as far as I am aware[8] (although, Julius Hart could be describing a Romero film when he compares Eysoldt’s Elektra to ‘what in Indian literature is called Wetålaka, a ghost that circles around execution places and gallows, dwells in corpses, feeds on rotting flesh’; she is for him a creature that ‘wants to sink its hand and mouth into twitching intestines, rummage into, beat, whip and rip bloody flesh’);[9] however, the production inspired more than a few to raise the specter of the living dead or point to an unsettling blurring of the boundaries between life and death. Hofmannsthal, Reinhardt, and Eysoldt each played a part in this necromancy.
Describing the poet’s adaptation of the Attic tragedy for the Jewish culture magazine, Die Propyläen, Ludwig Coellen explained, approvingly, that ‘an artist, Hofmannsthal, breathed life into a dead body, that is my opinion’.[10] Conversely, the critic for the Breslauer Generalanzeiger qualified his praise for the poet with an atemporal accusation: ‘Hofmannsthal showed what he can do. It’s too bad that in order to do so he first had to murder a Sophocles’.[11] Of all the hyperbole that characterizes reviews of this production – and many of the reviews are exceedingly entertaining in their histrionics – this allegation is among my favorites. The suggestion that Hofmannsthal murdered Sophocles implies that the Attic poet was somehow still alive (for German traditionalists) in the first place, and Hofmannsthal’s work re/turned him to the dead. The metaphysical understanding of Sophocles’ living spirit in the German theatrical tradition becomes uncanny through the highly physical suggestion of his murder [ihn umbringen]. It suspends Sophocles’ between life and death, pointing to problems in the temporality of live performance that make the theatre an inherently in-between space of the living dead (a point to which I will return shortly).[12]
Gertrud Eysoldt as ‘Elektra Listening to the Murder of her Mother’. Photograph by Aura Hertwig. Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 12, no. 48 (1903), 755.
If Hofmannsthal was at fault for raising Sophocles from, or returning him to, the dead, Reinhardt and Eysoldt exaggerated the problem by forcing viewers to physically enter a space between life and death in the theatre. The critic for the Casseler Tageblatt notes specifically how Reinhardt’s decadent aesthetics impacted viewers: ‘Apart from the offence to reverence for the Attic model, we are repelled by the sultry and unhealthy atmosphere of this decadent art which now threatens to make itself at home in the theatre’.[13] Conservative critics were wont to describe decadence in decidedly haptic and paradoxical terms: sickening yet seductive, tangible in its effects, but illusive in its substance. Decadence was an encompassing atmospheric threat.[14] This danger, a danger that viewers sensed as much as or more than recognized, certainly contributed to the intensity of reactions evident in criticism of the production. The viewer was not merely asked to consider the events on stage, both real and imagined; they were made to feel them. Indeed, what theatre historians have noted in responses to the 1903 Elektra is how much critics focused on their experience of the production. Reinhardt’s innovation of closing the theatre doors and not allowing audience members in or out during the course of the production, the elimination of any intermission during its ninety-minute run, and the excessively stimulating lighting design made viewers feel claustrophobic and sensorily assaulted. Erika Fischer-Lichte has, furthermore, written extensively about the recurring theme of hypnosis in reviews.[15] Critics, either approvingly or censoriously, noted that the audience was spellbound for the entirety of the production and could only slowly regain themselves when it ended (reviews of the 1903 Elektra repeatedly highlight how audiences sat in silence, unable to move or react, for several minutes after the final scene). This trance amounted to a loss of control over the self. The viewer was thus made into a zombie of sorts, their consciousness suspended and their bodies compelled by an external force.
While the dramatic text and the production design created an ideal environment for this enchantment, it was Eysoldt who physically appeared to cast the spell. Her Elektra was, as Hart describes, an intensely visceral, gruesome, and captivating presence on the stage. Writing about Eysoldt’s Elektra, Fischer-Lichte demonstrates how her specific performance style made viewers simultaneously aware of the role she performed, and her being as a performer on the stage (her dual semiotic and phenomenal presence).[16] Eysoldt/Elektra thus exaggerated the age-old problem of really pinning down what performance is, and who or what a performer becomes in the act of performing. As I argue elsewhere, this problem crystalized in the case of modern actresses at the turn of the twentieth century, and further still with the intense and intensely aberrant female roles they performed.[17] While the dangerous and deviant women of modern literature could be safely observed on the page, the sense that women brought them to life on stage was frightening for some. Describing Eysoldt’s recurring appearances as ‘women of modern decadence’ in the theatre in a 1903 essay for Bühne und Welt, Marie Luise Becker writes: ‘Earth-spirits, abhorred by the bourgeoisie just as they were burned centuries ago, rise up before the poet out of the fog and haze. Gertrud Eysoldt makes them human’.[18] In his review of Elektra, Coellen then firmly situates his understanding of Eysoldt/Elektra’s alive-ness in relation to the character’s death: ‘For us she lives, this woman, who consumes her own being to death with an insanely perverse obsession and without a trace of an intrinsic ethical purpose in life’. There is then a notable contrast with his understanding of Sophocles’ drama, which, he argues, ‘is not alive for us; we enjoy it with our historical sense, a little like a scholar, like a connoisseur of literary values from the past. The way that a natural historian enjoys a fossil’. Breathing life into Sophocles on the decadent stage created temporal confusion specifically related to expectations for who/what could be made to live in the now.[19]
In this sense, as Rebecca Schneider has explored more extensively in contemporary theatre and performance, all performed characters are theatrical zombies of a kind.[20] Performance-theoretical debates from the nineteenth- to the early-twentieth century focused on the performer’s autonomy in relation to the text and the production in ways that exaggerated the potential to understand acted roles as the undead, things brought to life, depending on the theory of choice – either text animated by a human form, or a human form puppeted by the force of a dramatic text. A confluence of factors related to this context and to the specificities of the 1903 Elektra only amplified an engagement with these questions: the brutal and gruesome plot and dialogue of Hofmannsthal’s dramatic text in juxtaposition with his invocation of Sophocles’ and classical traditions; the somatic effects and disturbing atmospherics that Reinhardt created for audiences; and Gertrud Eysoldt’s unique, and identifiably modernist, style of performance, her intense physicality and the resulting simultaneous awareness of her semiotic and phenomenal presence on stage, as Fischer-Lichte contends, further intensified by how she drew attention to her acts of performance, as I have argued elsewhere.
Gertrud Eysoldt in ‘Elektra’s Dance Scene in the Final Act’. Photograph by Aura Hertwig. Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 12, no. 48 (1903), 755.
This leads me to the final zombie encounter in the 1903 Elektra. The most discussed moment in the production was Elektra’s final dance (which some scholars have examined as a Totentanz [dance of death]).[21] Orest murders Klytämnestra and Aegisth within the palace as Elektra crouches by the door listening with glee. When the revenge is complete, she then erupts in a ‘nameless dance’, striding forward toward the audience until she ‘takes a few final steps of the most strained triumph and collapses’; her sister Chrysothemis then runs to her side and finds her ‘rigid’. In his private writings, Hofmannsthal states with certainty that this ‘collapse’ is Elektra’s death.[22] The dramatic text, with its minimal stage directions, does not clearly indicate whether she dies or not, however, and Eysoldt’s stage performance also left the matter up for debate. While most reviewers declared her dead in the end, some, like the Berliner Tageblatt critic Fritz Engel, were less certain, noting that she, ‘collapses, like dead or actually dead – we do not get clear indication about this. In any case she geht … zu Grunde [collapses/perishes] with the deed that she instigated’.[23] In either interpretation, Eysoldt/Elektra’s final act presented a lingering experience of the undead for viewers: either the curtain falls on Elektra in an indeterminate state between life and death, or Elektra is dead and Eysoldt rises to take her bow and then perform again, to bring Elektra back to life, in the next show.[24]
In many ways then, every night in the theatre is a night of the living dead.[25] The turn-of-the-century decadents with their threatening atmospherics and performances that robbed viewers of their rational capacities for a time, and perhaps even more so the reactions from their critics, brought theatregoers face to face with this uncanny understanding of live dramatic theatre. So closely tied to the idea of degeneration in a production like the 1903 Elektra, decadent theatre viscerally engages viewers with its excessive aliveness while simultaneously perpetually dying. Ent-art-ung is a gerund and thus an active noun after all, one that entails the present progressive temporality of live performance, a continuous making and unmaking, like the undeadness of a zombie, a de-naturing that must necessarily point to its implicit original and its ongoing d/evolution. Moreover, theatre as perhaps an inherently decadent art forces performers and viewers into an experiential encounter with this act of living/dying. Karl Strecker encapsulates this idea as he names the 1903 Elektra the epitome of decadent art: ‘In fact, I consider Hofmannsthal’s Elektra in and of itself to be not only the strongest work of the poet to date, but rather to be one of the most harrowing literary revelations of our age, the most powerful swelling (and perhaps death-tremor?) of decadence’.[26]
Notes
[1] A private production of Wilde’s Salomé on the Deutsches Theater’s smaller stage premiered in November 1902. When they received permission to stage the play publicly, Reinhardt took over as director and moved it to the main stage with a new cast and a new production design by Lovis Corinth and Max Kruse.
[2] Hofmannsthal consulted Freud and Breuer’s work on hysteria while writing the play.
[3] I examine this in more detail in my article ‘Rat Teeth not Roses: Aesthetics and Politics of the Grotesque in Gerhart Hauptmann’s Naturalist Theater’, German Studies Review 42.3 (2019): 427-445.
[4] On this see Erika Fischer-Lichte, Die Entdeckung des Zuschauers: Paradigmenwechsel auf dem Theater des 20. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Francke, 1997).
[5] J.L., review of Elektra, Berliner Börsen-Kurier, 31 October 1903. Max Reinhardt Archive and Library (Binghamton University Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives. Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York; hereafter referred to as MRA) R8464. All translations from German to English are my own.
[6] Karl Strecker, review of Elektra, Tägliche Rundschau, 31 October 1903. MRA R8514.
[7] Review of Elektra, Tilsiter Zeitung, 4 November 1903. MRA R8516.
[8] The word ‘zombie’ [der Zombi] was available in German at the time, though not commonly used. Interestingly, the famous children’s author, Isabella Braun (1815-1886) published a short stage play titled Der Zombi in her 1865* Neues Kindertheater. Eine Sammlung beliebter Theaterstücke zum Selbstaufführen für die Jugend [Children’s Theatre. A Collection of Beloved Plays for Self-Production for Youth]. (*Nancy Lukens estimates that Braun first published the collection in 1865. Nancy Lukens, ‘Children’s Literature / Children’s Theater,’ in Friederike Eigler and Susanne Kord (eds.), The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 67). The two-volume collection was evidently popular, as the Stuttgart-based publisher O. Risch had run three editions by 1890, with later editions appearing under the title Kleine Theaterstücke für die Jugend [Little Theatre Plays for Youth]. The short drama indicates the influence of French and Spanish colonialism and the international slave trade in spreading zombie lore to Germany. The protagonist Morillo, a master painter, has a ‘slave’ named Comes, who insists that a ‘Zombi’ is responsible for the beautiful paintings that begin mysteriously appearing in the studio. Comes, who learned the story from his father, describes the zombie more like a spirit, a talented painter who never finished his works and so is cursed to ‘…wander like a ghost through the long night / and paint, paint until the light of morning, / but whosoever disturbs him is doomed to die!’ The zombie turns out to be Comes’ own son, Sebastian, who was born a free man and works in the studio as a lowly paint mixer. He has carefully observed Morillo’s lessons to his apprentices and secretly developed a gift for painting himself. The drama resolves when the truth is finally revealed and, much to Sebastian’s surprise, the (white European) apprentices embrace Sebastian as their ‘brother’ in art and Morillo agrees to free Comes so that Sebastian can pursue his talent without the burden of knowing that his father is a slave. Isabella Braun, Der Zombi in Kleine Theaterstücke für die Jugend (Stuttgart: O. Risch), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b280038&view=1up&seq=15.
[9] Julius Hart, review of Elektra, Der Tag, Berlin, 1 November 1903. MRA R8482.
[10] Ludwig Coellen, ‘Drei neue Dramen’. Die Propyläen no. 34, 5 February 1904. MRA R8520. Coellen argues that Hofmannsthal’s Elektra exemplifies a Dekadent-juduäische [decadent-Jewish] style. In some ways he finds the effort successful, but he contends that the Greek source material resisted the decadent style, as opposed to Wilde’s Salomé, which for him grew, ‘organically from out of the related cultural milieu of the Oriental-Jewish into a completely unified work of art’. On Hofmannsthal’s engagement with Jewish identity in his work, see Abigail Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hoffmann, and Schnitzler (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 54-76.
[11] R.P, review of Elektra, Breslauer Generalanzeiger, 4 November 1903. MRA R8474.
[12] See Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, (London: Routledge, 2011); Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
[13] Review of Elektra, Casseler Tageblatt, 3 November 1903. MRA R8476.
[14] Critics with modernist sensibilities were more likely to dismiss or at least qualify the supposed threat of decadence. Coellen writes, for example: ‘We enjoy Hofmannsthal’s Elektra with the comforting awareness that this damned story cannot harm us. What is decadence to us? Humanity is robust, it feels it like an illness. Like an illness of the minority that threatens us for a time, but that could not attach itself to our healthy bodies, – an illness of a few days which causes much too much shrieking’. Coellen, review of Elektra.
[15] Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005), 1-15.
[16] Fischer-Lichte, Theater, Sacrifice, Ritual, 5.
[17] This is a focus of my book, The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2021).
[18] Marie Luise Becker, ‘Berliner Bühnenkünstler. Gertrud Eysoldt’, Bühne und Welt: Zeitschrift für Theaterwesen, Litteratur und Musik, 5.2 (1903): 635-41, 638. See also Yvonne Ivory, 'Gertrud Eysoldt and the Persistence of Decadence on the German Avant-Garde Stage', Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 2 (1) (2019), 16-38. http://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/volupte/article/view/572/699.
[19] On the uncanny nature of a/historical experiences in the theatre, see Carlson, The Haunted Stage.
[20] Rebecca Schneider, ‘It Seems As If…I am Dead. Zombie Capitalism and Theatrical labor’, TDR: The Drama Review, 56.4 (2012), 150-162.
[21] See for example Jill Scott, Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 33-39; Gabrielle Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes, trans. Elena Polzer and Mark Franko (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2015 [1997]), 227-30. Brandstetter also examines Elektra’s dance as a Maenad’s dance (as indicated in the stage directions) and a ‘fire dance’.
[22] In his diary, Hofmannsthal writes: ‘The ending also became instantly clear: that she could not continue to live, that when the final stroke fell, her life and her viscera would extravasate, like a drone when it impregnates the queen, with the impregnating stinger its viscera and its life extravasate’. Klaus E. Bohnenkamp and Mathias Mayer (eds), Hugo von Hofmannsthal Sämtliche Werke Kritische Ausgabe Band 7: Dramen 5, (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1997), 309-400.
[23] Fritz Engel, review of Elektra, Berliner Tageblatt, 31 October 1903. MRA R8471.
[24] On this see Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains, in particular her chapter ‘In the meantime: performance remains’, 87-110.
[25] See also Carlson, The Haunted Stage; Blau, Take Up the Bodies.
[26] Karl Strecker, review of Elektra, Tägliche Rundschau, 31 October 1903. MRA R8514.