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The Black Medeas of Weimar and Nazi Berlin:

Jahnn-Straub and Straub-Grillparzer

Glen W. Gadberry

Theatre Survey / Volume 33 / Issue 02 / November 1992, pp 154 - 166

DOI: 10.1017/S0040557400002386, Published online: 07 July 2009

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Glen W. Gadberry (1992). The Black Medeas of Weimar and Nazi Berlin:
Jahnn-Straub and Straub-Grillparzer. Theatre Survey, 33, pp 154-166
doi:10.1017/S0040557400002386

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Theatre Survey 33 (November 1992)

GLEN W. GADBERRY

THE BLACK MEDEAS OF WEIMAR AND

NAZI BERLIN: JAHNN-STRAUB AND
STRAUB-GRILLPARZER

Today is payday Jason Your Medea

Will collect her debts today

Would I'd remained the animal I was

Before my man made me into bis woman
Medea The barbarian . . . .
—Heiner Miiller Medeamaterial

While earlier dramatists treated Medea as a dramatic character, it was

Euripides who gave her enduring theatrical prominence. Beyond crafting
a timely attack upon a treacherous Corinth to appeal to Athens at the
start of the Peloponnesian War, Euripides developed Medea to question
the social role of women within a proudly patriarchal society. And he
may have been the first to make Medea a non-Greek, a Colchian, a
"barbarian"—a term that had become more derisive in the fifth century.1
In the Golden Age, a female foreigner was marginalized by gender and
by heritage/race/ethnicity, a justified or sympathetic Medea challenged
Athenian prejudices about both. Yet this Medea is problematic a
seriously aggrieved wife is driven to horrible acts against Greeks —Jason,
his sons, the king of Corinth, and as a complicating fillip of multi-gender
vengeance, the female rival. Our sympathies are subverted: a wronged

1
See Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), 5 ff. Her evidence suggests that the pre-classic "barbarian" was
determined linguistically: a "barbarian" was someone who did not speak Greek.
Refinements came during the fifth century, when the barbarian became "the universal anti-
Greek against whom Hellenic—especially Athenian—culture was defined."

154
BLACK MEDEA 155

Medea could also be a bloody figure of feminine and alien power, fatal
to men and women, public and domestic order.
Whether Euripides changed the status of women or "barbarians" in
Athens (or in any subsequent society) is not the concern here. He
created a character and situation which has continued to appeal to play-
wrights, and after they had access to the literary stage, to actresses as
well. Reborn in new periods, these Medea variations have been major
acting vehicles and powerful commentaries on domestic infidelity, civic
misogyny, national xenophobia and/or any new topic which could be
grafted upon the plot. Two particularly striking, twentieth-century
versions were produced in Berlin: the first in 1926, during the liberal
Weimar Republic, the second in 1933, during the racist Nazi dictatorship.
The traditional Euripidean themes were radicalized in each by making
Medea a black woman. The first was an invention of the playwright, the
second of the actress who had created the 1926 Medea and who now
played the second. The black Medea icon redoubled the intensity of these
gender and race revenge plays, as Germany came under foreign and black
occupation, and as nationalists embraced racism for political and artistic
authority. The German black Medeas were effective theatre, challenging
prejudices against women, and more powerfully, within the context of
Weimar and Third Reich Berlin, against blacks, aliens and "barbarians."
Until 1918, most Germans had only distant notions of black identity.
At best, Germans romanticized black Africans as noble savages; at worst,
they dismissed them as sub-human primitives. Germany's limited colonial
experience in Africa reinforced Eurocentric paternalism. Direct
confrontation to these attitudes came after World War I: empowered by
the Treaty of Versailles and collapsing schedules of reparation, the Allies
occupied the Rhineland (January 1919), the Ruhr cities (March 1921) and
the whole of the Ruhr valley (January 1923). Some thirty thousand
French Colonial troops, from Senegal, Madagascar, and other African
outposts joined other Allied forces stationed in Germany. Protests against
their use began almost immediately, in Germany and other countries,
including the United States.2 According to Major-General Henry Allen,

2
In a statement published in the New York Times, 3 January 1921, 17, under the
headline, "Wants Protest to France," Republican Representative Britten of Illinois
furthered the heated atmosphere when he commented, "I cannot believe that the civilized
nations of the world will long countenance the retention of semi-civilized African troops in
the Rhineland of Germany, when repeated protests, not only from the women of the world,
but of high ranking British and French authorities, are outspoken against this procedure
because of the brutalities that are daily being committed against old women as well as
156 THEATRE SURVEY

Commander of the (all-white) American Forces in Germany, in his 1927

history of the occupation, "European sentiment, in general, was inclined
to sympathize with the feelings of the German population. From many
points of view it was deemed unwise to utilize semi-civilized colored
troops, whether brown or black, as an occupying force in the territory of
a highly civilized people."3 The international uproar, abetted by accounts
of "uncivilized" behavior, sexual and otherwise, exposed widespread
prejudice against Africans. It also fueled the more extreme ideology of
race hatred.
Adolf Hitler and the German Right, building upon nineteenth-century
notions of racial destiny, used the Rhine-Ruhr occupation to build a
crackpot case against the French, their African conscripts, and the
supposed manipulator of both: an "international Jewish conspiracy."
While Hitler was vehement about a "destructive" African aesthetic in
music (jazz) and art (as ridiculed in Decadent Art Shows, from 1933
onward), what most engorged his rhetoric was the supposed threat to
German racial purity. To Hitler's lurid fantasies, blacks were the bad
seed sown in the Aryan homeland by a "Negrified" France, which had
been culturally and genetically destroyed by Jews. The Rhine-Ruhr
occupation was the latest occurence in the Jewish-directed plot to ruin
"the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization." He
feared that Jews would then become masters of Germany.4
While Hitler dictated Mein Kompf and Europeans objected to Africans
on their war-ravaged, but "civilized" continent, Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-
19S9) worked on his remarkable Medea variant.5 His black Medea,
produced in 1926, may be the first bi-racial treatment of the Euripidean
prototype. In 1927 and 1929, he posed the questions which had produced
the play:

defenseless young women and girls."

3
Henry T. Allen, The Rhineland Occupation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927), 324.
4
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 325;
cf. 624. Mein Kampf summarizes Hitler's goals and expressions up to 1924, and thereafter
continued to express the majority viewpoint of the Party. Hitler most frequently mentions
Blacks parenthetically, as the equivalent of "the primitive" or "the subhuman."
5
Hans Henny Jahnn, Medea (Frankfurt am Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1958).
Both the prose and later verse editions are available in Jahnn, Dramen I, 1917-1929:
Dramen, dramatische Versuche, Fragmente, ed. Ulrich Bitz (Hamburg: Hoffmann und
Campe, 1988). The volume also contains "Zur Medea," "Die Sagen urn Medea und ihr
Leben," and "Medea."
BLACK MEDEA 157
Why must Blacks be barbarians for us as Colchis was for the Greeks?
The Racial Question: What had been barbarians for the Greeks are for today's
Europeans Blacks, Malays, Chinese.
One of the most shameful practices of Europeans is the disregard for individual
members of the various non-White races.6

His sentiments are commendable, but Medea focused on events and

themes which obscured his humanitarian sensibilities. In approach and
technique, Jahnn is best understood as a "Black Expressionist," a
designation of Frankfurt critic and historian Giinther Ruhle. The Black
Expressionists radicalized the more familiar, idealistic and naive "oh
Mensch" Expressionism by "turning to the instincts and sadism of
mankind. [They wrote plays] which overflowed with lust and sexuality,
with the pathologic urge to murder and with perversion: a theatre of
brutality."7 They were angry young German and Austrian writers whose
plays exploded the constrictions imposed upon action and imagination by
Central European arch-patriarchy and the barbarism of war. The early
plays of Jahnn, Arnolt Bronnen, Bertolt Brecht, and others shocked
audiences with their deeply-felt, post-Freudian portraits of the violent and
sexual possibilities of man. The Black Expressionists stripped away lily-
white, rose-colored illusions and provoked the bourgeois: there is no God,
there is no sanctity of youth, there are no positive achievements, love
conquers nothing at all. Their protagonists are attractive and repellant by
turns: Baal, Richard III, sons who murder their fathers, a mother who
murders her children—and others.
Jahnn completed his prose Medea in 1924 and subsequently recast the
play into free verse.8 He imagined the larger Colchis, an ancient land
bordering the Black Sea, in black Africa.9 By the logic of this geography,
he made Medea and the Colchian slave chorus blacks, the two sons bi-
racial: all are regarded as barbarians by the play's Greeks. Jahnn also

Respectively, "Die Sagen um Medea," and "Medea," in Dramen /, 939 and 956.
7
Gunther Ruhle, Theaterfiir die Republik, 1917-1933, im Spiegel derKritik (Frankfurt
am Main: S. Fischer, 1967), 24-25.
The major difference between the prose and verse editions is format, the way the
lines are displayed on the page. Subsequent references to the play will appear in the text;
they refer to the verse Medea (Frankfurt am Main, 1959).
9
While Colchis was not in Africa, there is some evidence, based upon Herodotus, that
there were Black Colchians, the descendants of an army sent by Egypt's Pharaoh Sesostris,
ca. 2000 B.C. See W. P. McDonald, "The Blackness of Medea," College Language
Association Journal 19 (1975): 23, n. 5.
158 THEATRE SURVEY

developed a second, equally striking variation on the prototype: rather

than showing Medea and Jason in the early years of marriage, with a pair
of sentimental, Euripidean toddlers in tow, he gives us a husband and wife
who have been together for at least twenty years. Their sons are young
adults, Medea is past middle age, while Jason, subject to the magic of
black wife and Gold Fleece, has not aged—as Jahnn describes him
elsewhere, he is to "appear younger than his children."10
Jason's irresponsible youth and an aging foreign wife drive his infidel-
ities, and the tragedy. He tells Medea he loves her as any man his age:
love stops when one's sons are grown (26-27). The irony, of course, is
that he if a young man, at least half his chronologic age. He has been a
stranger to her bed for the last seven years while he made love to other
women and men (32-33). He has even perverted respected Greek
traditions of pederasty by courting his sons. As he tells her, "The house
of Medea is full of handsome men, / not of beautiful women" (25).
Catastrophe comes in Corinth. Jason's elder son falls in love with
Creon's daughter. Jason is to arrange a marriage, to bind the city to its
famous international refugees. But once he sees Creusa, he wants her
himself; he supplants his son and rejects his matronly wife—he drops his
black family for this beautiful Greek girl. Creon is relieved: he had no
intention of giving his daughter to a bi-racial barbarian anyway (61). The
play ends in gory destruction that surpasses Euripides, or even Seneca.
Jason delivers Medea's fatal wedding gifts and must narrate the horrible
results. Creon is bisected by Medea's magical gold ring." Creusa, who
remains unnamed and unseen in this version, thereby preventing her
innocence from subverting the focus, is dissolved by the fatal golden gown.
Medea then goes off to kill her sons. That they are adults complicates
the act, but she finds them at an opportune time: the elder, maddened by
his father's treachery, has fallen upon the younger in anger and lust. With
one heroic sword thrust, Medea kills the two in sexual embrace. Back on

10
Jahnn, "Brief zur Berliner Urauffuhrung der Medea," in Das Theater des deutschen
Regisseurs JOrgen Fehling, ed. Joana Maria Gorvin, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Quadriga, 1987), 118-
119.

" Medea observes that she was only following Creon's law: whoever leaves corpses to
dogs and crows deserves to be dismembered (99). But Creon does not say this during the
play, nor are any corpses left as carrion, so the reference must be to his Theban namesake
in Sophocles' Antigone. Jahnn's cross-dramatic reference is a bit of privileged literary
whimsy which offsets some of the severity of Black Expressionism. It is comparable to his
world-weary Richard III at Bosworth Field announcing that he will refuse a horse even if
offered (at the close of Die Krdnung Richards III).
BLACK MEDEA 159

stage, she torments Jason with the account of their coupled death and
prevents him from seeing his dead sons and lovers. She damns his future
and sends him off, saying, "Become a pimp—you don't know any other
craft" (110). She flees with the corpses of her children, in a wagon drawn
by the white horses Jason had given his sons. The earthquake she sum-
moned then begins—it will cast palace, Corinthian dead and Colchian
chorus into the sea.
Medea escapes, a triumphant Black Expressionist avenger unleashed
by Jason's ego-centric lust and by Greek racism. While she certainly has
been abused by the Greeks, she has lost our sympathy. Beyond the tradit-
ional ambiguity associated with the sorceress, Jahnn's Medea has
incestuous passions for her brother and for his reborn image, her son.
She has Creon's messenger blinded (offstage) and offers up the gore to
empower her revenge (onstage). She is more civilized than the Greeks,
she tells the outraged Creon: the messenger was not chopped into pieces,
"only blinded" (62). And after Jason recounts Creusa's gruesome death,
Medea adds further torment: had he but kissed Creusa as her body
dissolved, she would have been restored. After the fact, it is information
Jason does not need, or an even more cruel lie. This Black Expressionist
Medea is a barbarian, one among many.
The verse Medea premiered at Leopold Jessner's Berlin Staatliches
Schauspielhaus under the direction of Jiirgen Fehling on 4 May 1926. It
received eight performances, one ironically on Mother's Day, it was a
respectable run, considering the size of the theatre (1000 seats) and the
radicalism of the play, and the fact that it was the end of the season. The
premiere earned energetic, "practically frantic," applause; director and
playwright made repeated curtain calls. Reviews typically praised Agnes
Straub as the blackface Medea—"possessed," "vital power," "worthy of
wonder," and "virtuoso" punctuate the commentary. But Berlin's critics
split on Jahnn and the play.12 Many were disturbed by the pervasive
incest: brother-sister, brother-brother, father-son, mother-son. Paul
Fechter wrote that he normally avoided words like "sick" or "healthy" in
reviews, but in Jahnn's case, "there is a place for which the word 'sick' is
too mild an expression." The critic in the Catholic Germania questioned
how the "first theatre of the nation" could become this "wasteland of

12
Reviews by Paul Fechter, Alfred Kerr, and Emil Faktor are reprinted in Riihle,
TheaterJiir die Repubtik, 711-716. See also Max Hochdorf, "Staatstheater. Medea von Hans
Henny Jahnn," VorwSrts (Berlin), evening ed., 5 May 1926: 2; and F. S. [Franz Servaes?],
"Staatstheater. Jahnns Medea" Germania (Berlin), evening ed., 5 May 1926: 2.
160 THEATRE SURVEY

perverse pubescent fantasies." The irrascible Alfred Kerr compared

Medea to Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Electra: the Austrian made his
Electra a Nordic woman, Jahnn made his Medea a "raging mammy. / A
howling wild thing with fat belly, with bad body odor, with unquenched
late-life lust." She was "An animal."
While reviewers resorted to racial epithets, there was no critique of
racism, much less of the uproar over black soldiers of occupation. If
Jahnn hoped to provoke a discussion of prejudice, the reviews must have
been disappointing. But his program essay did not speak to race; instead,
he took his audience into wildly unfamiliar and remote pre-history.13
The exotic excess of Black Expressionism—the bloodletting, sexuality, and
syntactically odd German delivered double fort6—precluded contempo-
rary reference. The racial complex could not pass the stage frame except,
perhaps, as racist perjorative. In terms of Jahnn's "Racial Question," this
highly theatrical Medea was a brilliant failure. When the Nazis came to
power, Medea was banned, like the other works of the playwright, and
Jahnn went into exile. His Medea variations returned to the German
stage only in 1964 and 1988; they continue to be controversial.14
If the first black Medea was too radical, the second, more staid and
polite, offered greater racial clarity, in part because of the hyper-racist
Nazi era in which it was staged. Seven years after creating Jahnn's black
Medea, Agnes Straub revived Franz Grillparzer's 1821 Medea, the
culminating work of his Golden Fleece trilogy.15 Siegfried Jacobsohn

13
This "primitivism" is suggested by a setting he sketched for the manuscript: a neo-
paleolithic, cave-like Corinthian hall—albeit classically symmetrical (reprinted with the
prose Medea, in Jahnn, Dramen I,585). Fehling's designer, Rochus Gliese, apparently did
not follow Jahnn's concept.
14
The verse Medea was produced in 1964 at Wiesbaden, directed by the young Hans-
Giinther Heymc; the prose version premiered in Cologne in 1988. The verse version
reemerged, with Barbara Niisse as Medea, in DUsseldorf in 1989: it would approach the
1926 premiere in notoriety. See Henning Rischbieter, "Versuch mit Jahnn. Medea in
Wiesbaden" and "'Die Gotter sind nicht milde.' Gesprach iiber Medea mit dem Regisseur
Hans-Giinther Heyme," Theater heute, February 1965,34-35; Eckhard Franke, "Liebe heifier
als der Tod. Koln startet mit der Uraufflihrung von Hans Henny Jahnns Ur-Medea,"
Theater heute, November 1988, 25-26; and Jochen Schmidt, "Sexualitat und Opfer. Werner
Schroeter inszeniert Hans Henny Jahnns Medea," Theater heute, April 1989, 30.
15
Grillparzer, Medea, in his Dramatische Meisterwerke (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek,
n.d.), 2:103-185. Der Gastfreund (one act), Die Argonauten (four acts), and Medea (five acts)
make up the trilogy, which premiered on 26 and 27 March 1821 at the Vienna Burgtheater.
The trilogy was normally presented on two evenings.
BLACK MEDEA 161

compared the two Medeas in 1926: he much preferred Jahnn's two hours
of wild passion to Grillparzer's two evenings of "leaden boredom." Grill-
parzer's "mistake" was trying to preserve classic horror and "to foist on
[Medea] the inner life of a figure from Ibsen. . . . His Medea was Nora
and becomes Norma but neither Nora nor Norma has murdered her
children. . . . I can think of only one way to keep this false clap-trap
from becoming parody: music. Medea as opera might have a future."16
Having played Jahnn, and Ibsen as well, Straub knew another way to
animate the 1821 text. As the first black Medea and as producer and
creator of the second, Agnes Straub (1890-1941) is pivotal to this history.
Straub had had a brilliant career in Berlin since she arrived in 1915.
She worked for Reinhardt, Jessner and Piscator; she played Aeschylus'
Clytemnestra to open the GroBes Schauspielhaus, and Bronnen's Luise
Fessel to open the Black Expressionist series at the Deutsches Theater;
she created Jahnn's black Medea and would play Elizabeth in his
Coronation of Richard III eight months later; she performed Shakespeare,
Schiller, Ibsen, Hasendever, Brecht; she recreated the classics in
memorable productions in Berlin's major theatres and created commer-
cially untouchable modernists in transient theatre clubs. It is a record
which earns her a most respected place in theatre history, but it was all
highly suspect to the Nazis. Her personal and artistic associates, after all,
were Jews, Communists and the decadent avant-garde. When the Nazis
seized the public stage and later the commercial theatres as well, Straub
was marginalized by her artistic past.17

16
Jacobsohn, "Medea," Die Weltbahne, 25 May 1926, 819-820.

Straub's situation is suggested by reactions to her winning the Dumont prize, named
for actress and producer Louise Dumont, who had died in 1932. At the start of 1933,
Straub was the first recipient of a set of topaz which had been presented to Dumont by the
Queen of Wiirttemberg. The prize was to go to the German actress who best met the
"humanitarian and artistic qualities of Dumont." Straub was a logical choice. In the next
issue of the Deutsche BQhnenkarrespondenz—the organ for Alfred Rosenberg's Militant
League for German Culture and for the German Stage Union, a right-wing spectator
organization—Straub was praised for her interpretations of "Aryan" roles, but condemned
for her other artistic associations, including public readings of the letters of the hated
Jewish Communist Rosa Luxemberg. The journal dismissed the prize as an "appropriate
honor for the dead Jewess Dumont; the German-minded should take heed." See Joseph
Wulf, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich; Eine Dokumentation (Giitersloh: S. Mohn, 1964),
253-254. In 1935, the Rosenberg organization also condemned Straub's romantic
connections to Leo ReuB, who had played Jason: "Whether she was officially married to
the Jew Leo ReuB or merely lived with him is immaterial for the examination of these
facts"; Dresniak has concluded that these "assaults affected the career and private life of
162 THEATRE SURVEY

Not wishing to emigrate or retire, and unwilling to work in national-

ized theatres or merely commercial enterprises, Straub ran her own
company. Here was an opportunity, for the moment at least, to remain
independent, to train young talent, and to showcase her own skills. It was
with this Berlin company that Straub developed the productions she would
take on German tour in 1934, including Grillparzer's Medea. The text
was a seemingly safe choice for 1933, with its restrained poetry, limited
but acceptable production history and challenging, if dated, leading role.
The play's respectability comes from an overlay of conservative
nineteenth-century values and a secure sense of moral closure. Grillpar-
zer's Medea escapes, sans winged chariot or horse-drawn wagon, after a
melodramatic dismissal of Jason—"Suffer! . . . Endure! . . . Atone!"
The despairing Jason might be redeemed through suffering and penance.
Medea, wrapped in the Fleece which has driven the trilogy, will go to
Delphi to lay the golden pelt and her case before the god. One expects
she will be exonerated by Helios, her grandfather. There were nine-
teenth-century limits to barbarism, even when re-imagining antique pre-
history.
Like Euripides' prototype, Grillparzer's Medea is still the wronged
wife, a non-Greek "barbarian" who exacts bloody vengeance upon
Corinth, her young sons, and Jason, but she was thought less barbaric and
less ambiguous. She seemed a particularly justified domestic avenger,
suitable to nineteenth-century taste. Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson (1794-
1860), a cultivated commentator on European literature and performance,
expressed this genteel quality when she wrote, "Grillparzer has wisely kept
the virago and the sorceress, with whom we hardly sympathize, out of
sight as much as possible; while the human being, humanly acted upon
and humanly acting and feeling, is forever before us. There is a dreadful
truth and nature in the whole portrait, which is perfectly finished through-
out."18 To make the 1821 portrait "perfectly finished" for her percep-
tions of Nazi Berlin, and to distance the parody Jacobsohn feared in his
1926 assessment, Straub needed a new stage image. She adopted Jahnn's
Medea invention and made Grillparzer's Medea black. The dramaturgic
decision enriches the text with gross and subtle ironies, but more
importantly, it pulled Grillparzer into the twentieth century, jolted Berlin's

the actress." See Boguslaw Drewniak, Das Theater im NS-Suuu: Szenarium deuischer
Zeitgeschichte, 1933-1945 (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1983), 148.
1
Anna Jameson, "Grillparzer's Sappho and Medea," in her Studies, Stories, and
Memoirs (Boston: Tichnor and Fields, 1859), 109-110.
BLACK MEDEA 163

stage memory of Jahnn's Medea, and assaulted Third Reich racial policy.
Seen in its social context, Straub's 1933 Medea critiqued policies of other-
ness within the unashamedly racist Nazi state. It challenged prejudice and
the ideology of "barbarian" more clearly and powerfully than the 1926
Medea. Jahnn's black Medea was a provocative playwriting decision;
Straub's black Grillparzer Medea was a provocative dramaturgic choice.
It was also courageous, considering the race-baiting policies of the Third
Reich.
The Grillparzer-Straub Medea had a week's run at the leased, 750-seat
Theater in der StresemannstraBe (subsequently the SaarlandstraBe), a
respectable, but less significant stage than the Staatstheater. The theatre
was renamed when the Nazis, to discredit the image of former Chancellor
Gustav Stresemann, rechristened the street. The production opened 24
November 1933, during the first full Third Reich season; critical response
was tempered by changes that had occurred since the Nazis seized power
the previous winter and spring. Several periodicals which had reviewed
Jahnn's Medea, such as Siegfried Jacobsohn's Jewish-liberal Weltbiihne,
were no longer in existence, and many critics had emigrated or been
dismissed, including Jacobsohn, Alfred Kerr and Emil Faktor. Then-
replacements were Nazi-approved or more circumspect.
Incredibly, the 1933 critics did not seem to see Straub's mask of black-
ness; a few circled the race issue by alluding to "dark-light" conflict, but
with one notable exception, they did not mention that Straub played the
role in blackface. It seems a bald omission, an outrageous oversight;
Jahnn's Medea was written black, but not Grillparzer's familiar "white"
role. We may not think it unusual to see a black Medea in any Medea
variation, a black Hippolyta in Midsummer Night's Dream, or a black
Loman family in Death of a Salesman, but this kind of experiment was
extremely rare in the 1920s and 30s. It was the kind of avant-garde
manipulation the Nazis hated. The newly privileged critics could have
attacked Straub for "cultural bolshevism," but they kept silent. They
could have praised the experiment, but there was fear of an unpredictable
government: the production did not endorse Nazi stereotype, so the critics
talked about other matters.19 They protected themselves, and Straub as
well.

For reviews, see F. Morgenroth, "Agnes Straub als Medea," Neue Preufiische Zeitung
(Berlin), 25 November 1933: 8; ck., "Gastspiel Agnes Straub. Theater in der Stresemann-
straBe: Medea" Germania (Berlin), 25 November 1933: 8; aru., "Berliner Schauspieler—
Agnes Straub," Neue Preufiische Zeitung (Berlin), 18 February 1934: 14; and G.G., "Agnes
Straub: Medea. Gastspiel im Alberttheater," Dresdner Anzeiger, 2 June 1934: 2.
164 THEATRE SURVEY

However, a critic for the Nazi Party offical newspaper, the VoMscher
Beobachter ("Racial Observer"), did address the race issue. While others
overlooked this obvious alteration, Heinz von Lichberg titled his review
"The Black Medea of Straub" and ran a sketch of Straub in blackface and
black wig.20 Like Jacobsohn—a comparison he would have dis-
dained—Lichberg felt this Medea "rose up out of the verses of Grill-
parzer into a figure from Ibsen." Straub's black Ibsenesque Medea
played three roles in this performance: loving wife, dispossesed mother
and, most painfully, the "racial alien." Just months after German
minorities were legally declared unwanted guests, the ostensibly braun
Lichberg praised this black Medea as "an experiment that powerfully
emphasizes the actual problem of the racial alien, [someone] for whom
there is no place." What makes her "so enraged is not just a mother's
pain, or a wife's deception—what burns in her most strongly is her help-
less anger at being denied the community of the state because of her
race." Hitler and Rosenberg's Vb'Udscher Beobachter published a review
sensitive to the pain of racial discrimination and by implication, critical of
exclusive Graeco-German Aryanism. The production was a striking
combination of Grillparzer's humane Medea, Jahnn's blackface, and
Straub's brilliance. As Lichberg concluded, this "Medea stays in your
memory."
These productions, Jahnn-Straub and Straub-Grillparzer, raise some
important questions of interpretation. There is the temptation to dismiss
both as racist, reinforcing German stereotypes against blacks as "barbari-
an other." When we see the pictures, with blatant cross-color, blackface
acting, there is an alienating instant, an embarassed pause: the images are
offensive. Perhaps that is why Jahnn's black Medea, in the 1989
Diisseldorf production, played by a White actress, remained White, with
baldness serving as a visual indicator of "otherness"—coiffure presumably
being less politically sensitive than artificial skin color.21 That might
have been an appropriately non-confrontational choice for 1989 Diissel-

20
Lbg. [Heinz von Lichberg], "Die schwarze Medea der Straub: Grillparzers Tragodie
im Berliner Theater in der StresemannstraBe," Der vSOdsche Beobachter (Berlin), 25
November 1933: 8.

This Medea was also covered with geometric tatoos, to reinforce the "otherness."
Some might argue that the Diisseldorf experiment did as much violence to Jahnn's
conception of a Black Medea as Straub's Medea in blackface did to Grillparzer's notions
of a White Medea. That would be to assume that the playwright is the sole or final arbiter
of stage interpretation.
BLACK MEDEA 165

dorf, but it ill serves theatre history to judge the past according to current
notions of acceptability. If we dismiss these Medea experiments, we
distort the humanity and integrity of artists who made these difficult and
courageous artistic choices. In 1926 and 1933, there was no more correct
solution to these powerful interpretations; at the simplest level, there were
no German-speaking blacks to take either demanding part. In our post-
Brecht, post-Genet, post-modern age, we could find other ways to play a
black Medea, but we should not critique artists of the past for failing to
envision our solutions or to achieve our sophistication. Theatre history
should imagine theatrical events within their boundaries of possibility.22
Jahnn's 1924 play and 1926 premiere were predicated upon the ugly
racial uproar over the African-French occupation of the Rhine and Ruhr.
By making this wronged woman black, Jahnn disputed the mundane
image of "black barbarian" for a thinking and feeling German audience.
But the excesses of Black Expressionism led critics and audiences to
assume it was perfectly normal and natural to equate barbarian otherness
with blackness—had not Shakespeare done the same in Titus Andronicus?
Jahnn reinforced rather than subverted the boundaries of prejudice; he
was unable to move from Aaron, "his soul as black as his face," to
"brave," "sweet" Othello.
The 1933 Medea was more pointed, under a different social and racial
situation. The occupation of the Ruhr had ended in 1925 and that of the
Rhine in 1930; black colonial soldiers had left years before. There was
offensive anti-black propaganda, but it was subordinated to state anti-
Semitism, blacks were thought the culturally destructive tools of the
larger "Jewish Conspiracy." In 1933 German Jews were the outcasts of
choice. As Jews were removed from state and city theatres—many who
helped or shared in Agnes Straub's career—and as she was marginalized
by this new state, she revived Grillparzer's sympathetic Medea and made
her black. Spectators might have remembered the occupation, or Jahnn's
play, but it was more timely to see the pervasive otherness of Jews in the
Third Reich. Straub could not make Medea Jewish—that would have

Or according to Thomas Postlewait, "The historian's task, then, is the reenactment

of past thought in his or her own mind—with the understanding that the past is a different,
if not undiscovered country." See Postlewait, "Historiography and the Theatrical Event:
A Primer with Twelve Cruxes," Theatre Journal 43 (1991): 73.
166 THEATRE SURVEY

been too obvious—but she could make her black.23

These German black Medeas were provocative theatre. In 1926,
Jahnn adoped the black mask to radicalize the Medea material; in 1933,
Straub used blackness as a technique to prod audiences to see familiar
prejudice against blacks and Jews and other "barbarians" in a new way.
Bertolt Brecht, who began as a Black Expressionist and Jahnn adaptor (of
the massive Pastor Ephraim Magnus), would look to similar devices to call
attention to injustice hidden by the familiar and mundane. Despite the
innovations of Jahnn and Straub, audiences and critics kept silent about
race, out of irritation, respect or fear. Ironically, Heinz von Lichberg, of
the VoMscher Beobachter, seems the most clear-sighted and sympathetic,
but his commentary—in effect, "how terrible it is to be cut off from one's
community"—depends upon the preeminence of racially exlusive Volk, the
central pillar of Nazi ideology. Straub offered humanitarian insight in
1933 but, of course, could not stop the braun tide. Central Europe and
the world developed new definitions and techniques to humiliate and
destroy the "barbarian." To close with a quotation from Jahnn's Medea
commentaries, written in 1927, "If we stop to consider who we are, we
will forget the word 'barbarian.'>>24

Glen W. Gadberry is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance
at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

23
The grotesque situation of 1933 is further complicated as we imagine a blackface
Straub on the stage in Nazi Berlin. Her Jason—and according to Alfred Rosenberg, her
lover—was Jewish actor Leo ReuB (1891-1946). Only weeks after Goebbels decreed that
private German theatres would be nationalized to meet the artistic and racial demands
which had already been imposed on state theatres (15 May 1934), ReuB slipped away to
Austria. H e left s o quickly that Dresden newspapers continued to advertise him as Jason
to Straub's Medea, even though the role had been taken by Wolfgang Biittncr. ReuB
ultimately came to America, where, as Lionel Royce, he made a career in Hollywood war
films.
24
"Die Sagen um Medea," in Jahnn, Dramen I, 939. A version of this paper was
presented at the 1991 Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Seattle,
Washington.
Fig. Gl: Jahnn's Medea, 1926 premiere, with SUaubas Medea and Edwin Farber as Jason. Fig. G2: "Black Medea" sketch from Der volkische Beobachler, 1933.
Courtesy of the Theatermuseum der Universitat zu Koln.
Fig. G3: Third act sketch, with (from left) Werner Scharf as messenger, Straub as Medea, Friedrich
IQippel as Creon, Sabine Peters as Creusa, and Leo ReuB as Jason.
From Der voMsche Beobachter (Berlin) 25 November 1933.

Fig. G4: Jahnn's Medea.

Courtesy of the Theatermuseum der Universitat zu Koln.
Fig. G5: Straub as Grillparzer's Sappho. Fig. G6: Straub as Grillparzer's Medea, 1933. Fig. G7: Straub as Grillparzer's Medea, 1936.
From Agnes Straub's Im Wirbel des Jahrhunderts
Fig. R2: St. Louis Hotel and Rotunda (center-left), 1838.
(Detail from aerial view of New Orleans, Currier & Ives, 1884.)
Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, ace. no. 0035.

Fig. R3: Slave auction block, Rotunda, St. Louis Hotel (from a picture postcard, 1906).
Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, ace. no. 1958.85.220.
Fig. R4: Unidentified artist. Slave Auction. 1850s.
Courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art, PitUburgh, Gift of Mrs. W. Fitch IngersoU, 58.4.
Kg. R5: W R Brooke "Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans" (1854)
Courtesy of The Histonc New Orleans CoUection, ace no. 1953.149. ''

Fig. R6: The Octoroon, Adelphi Theatre, London Illustrated News, 30 November 1861
Courtesy of the Howard Tilton Memorial Ubrary, Tulane University.
Fig. R7: Jean-Leon Gerdme, Slave Market. Salon, 1867. Fig. R8: John BelL The Octoroon. Royal Academy, 1868.
Courtesy of Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. Courtesy of the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery.
Fig. R9: St. George Hare, The Victory of Faith. Royal Academy, 1891.
Reproduced by permission of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Kg. RIO: Jelly Roll Morton plays piano at Hilma Bur's Mirror Ballroom, c. 1904.
Courtesy of the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.
Fig. R l l : Storyville prostitute. Photo by Ernest Bellocq.
Courtesy of the Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.

Fig. R12: Edouard Manet, Ofympia (1863).

Courtesy of the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
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Fig. R13: Cover story, The Mascot, StoryviUe (1893).

Courtesy of the Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.
Fig. R14: Louisiana Superdome.
Courtesy of the Greater New Orleans Tourist & Convention Commission, Inc.

Fig. R15: Madonna and her Blond Ambition dancers.

Courtesy of London Features.