Weimar and Us

The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933–1945
by Gerwin Strobl
Cambridge University Press, 2007, 356 pages, $55.95
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In Berlin, immediately after the National Socialist takeover of power, a new play told of the life and death of Albert Schlageter, a leader of the German resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr a decade earlier when some 130 protesters were killed. Bertolt Brecht, the Left playwright who had already fled from the Nazis, had made a contemporary diary reference to the French colonial troops which is seldom referred to when his plays are produced in modern theatres: “In the Rhineland the negroes are sucking all the juice from the land. They are impregnating women by the dozen. They do so with impunity, merely laughing at the protests of the local population.”

The new play in the recently Nazified theatre came to a dramatic end with the execution of Schlageter by a French firing squad. At…