Institutional Dramaturgy at the Deutsches Theater Berlin

This chapter features an analysis of institutional dramaturgy at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater (DT) a few years before and at the beginning of World War I. Led by the two dramaturg personalities, Felix Hollaender and Arthur Kahane, the dramaturgical team was a vital part of Reinhardt’s artistic directorship. Hollaender’s and Kahane’s role within the institutional framework of the DT will be examined with specific regard to their in-house theatre journal Blätter des Deutschen Theaters, first published at the beginning of the theatre season 1911/1912 in August 1911. The analysis will show an ambivalent position of the two dramaturgs between propagandistic strategising and educational facilitation, which is both mirrored and realised in the project of the in-house journal and particularly comes to the fore in their reflection on the DT’s first war season 1914/1915.