Performing in Crisis Mode: the Munich National Theater, the Great Exhibition and the Cholera Epidemic in 1854
Meike Wagner
meike.wagner@teater.su.seStockholm University (Sweden)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1003-3979
Abstract
In 1854, the city of Munich had arranged for the “First General German Industrial Exhibition” to promote German industry to the world and invited a global audience to the event. At the same time, Franz Dingelstedt, director of the National Theater, organized a festival displaying the finest actors from Germany. Right after the opening of the festival, cholera started raging in the city and leaving 3,000 deaths in the final count. The author sketches out the role of the theatre in this crisis, when Dingelstedt was ordered by the king to keep the theatre open at any cost. This appears awkward, in regard to the current global pandemic crisis where theaters have been identified as risk zones for infection and consequently closed down. Why was the theatre at the time considered a safe and appropriate place even helping to counter the disease?
Keywords:
cholera epidemic, German theater, theater history 1800-1900, National Theater in Munich, Franz von Dingelstedt, medical and health discourseReferences
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Authors
Meike Wagnermeike.wagner@teater.su.se
Stockholm University Sweden
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1003-3979
Meike Wagner is Professor of Theatre Studies at Stockholm University. Previously, she has worked at LMU Munich and Mainz University. She is the author of Sutured Puppet Bodies: On the Theatre Body and the Medial Gaze, Bielefeld 2003, and Theatre and the Public Sphere in "Vormaerz’: Berlin, Munich and Vienna as Playgrounds of Bourgeois Media Practices, Berlin 2013. Her most recent research focuses on amateur theatre practices and citizenship in a historiographical perspective. Since 2018, she is Secretary General of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
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