In Germany, we have no vocabulary to describe the social and societal benefit of shared joy.
Allow me to introduce Olivia Maria Schaaf, a Berlin-based theater practitioner and scholar who directs and researches German musical theater. I met Olivia a little over a decade ago in rural Vermont, where I (somewhat reluctantly) performed opposite her in a production of Happy End that she also directed. In the following decade, Olivia has worked on touring productions, new musicals, and musical revues. Across these many and varied productions, Schaaf has maintained an interest in the status of the musical in Germany, the third largest market for musical theater in the world, following the U.S. and the UK. In her work as a director and her work as a scholar (she completed a PhD at Queen Mary University of London earlier this year), Olivia asks what the musical tells us about German culture, history, and identity.
I spoke with Olivia in the days leading up to the premier of a new musical she is directing, Hello! Again?, at the Musikalische Komödie in Leipzig. As with all of the shows she works on, Hello, Again? engages with what Olivia calls the “common denominators” of our artistic sensibilities, the points of emotional access that create spaces of understanding or belonging in her audiences. Some shows she has directed tap into audiences’ nostalgia and affection for a shared object, as in the revue Boybands Forever, while others forge imaginative links between present and past—as in the German singer-songwriter Malonda’s “Diven Unter Sich” (Divas Among Themselves), which imagines Blackness and queerness in early nineteenth–century central European bohème.
In our interview, I asked Olivia about her work as a scholar/practitioner, the significance she places on performances that audiences love, and the language that divides “serious” art from “entertainment” in Germany.
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MH: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who you are, what you do, etc.?
OMS: My name is Olivia Maria. I am a theater director focusing on musical theater, and I work in Germany. I’m German American, and I’m also a dirty little academic. I just finished my dissertation at Queen Mary University in London, where I researched musical theater in Germany from an international perspective.
MH: Why is an international perspective significant to your work?
OMS: There’s a huge literature gap in German research pertaining to musical theater. Tons of writing exists about the dramatic arts and performing arts in the German academy, but there is virtually nothing about the musical. This has always seemed strange to me, because Germany is the largest import market in the world for musical theater. A ton of Broadway and West End shows get produced in Germany and translated into the German language, both in for-profit musical companies but also in any of the over 150 state stages across the country. These state productions are fully subsidized, and musicals are by far the most desirable productions for audiences. It is astounding to me that the German cultural context and community aspect of musical theater is not studied.
To my knowledge, there are no universities that would have accepted my project in Germany. I’m paraphrasing and exaggerating slightly here, but the people I spoke about this project to all told me to do something serious, write something serious, which is ultimately what convinced me to pursue this project. In a very real sense, my process of finding an institution that would be supportive of this project is a parable of what I was researching, because in Germany, no one saw the value in this work.
MH: Can you tell us more about this divide in Germany? You said there is a significant body of scholarship on art and art making. What is the divide there? Where do you see that coming from?
OMS: There is language in Germany that categorizes different types of performance: “E” and “U” Theater. The E stands for “ernst,” which means serious, and U stands for “Unterhaltung,” which means entertainment. So there is explicit language in Germany to divide theater performance into either serious or entertaining, and yet, even though this kind of language exists, there is little to no literature to talk about why this language exists, what exactly these categories are, or whose authority they serve. This divide surpasses signifiers such as “highbrow” and “lowbrow” in terms of intensity, and I’m interested where that comes from.
On the one hand, there’s a lot of complex political and psychological baggage, of course, with the history of Germany in the Third Reich and its relationship to the arts. Art was such a contested semiotic and semantic site, where a fascist government decided what art was and what it wasn’t—the categories of art were rigidly enforced in service of a fascist, populist ideology. That and, of course, the massive brain drain of murdered or exiled people or people who had to flee to other countries who were involved in this kind of work, especially the entertaining arts.
I feel like in a way, especially from a practitioner side, I understand the need for categorization as a result of the deeply suppressed national guilt and shame over the eradication of the makers of entertainment during the Third Reich and beyond, with art makers then really not relearning, refining or recalibrating connection points with those types of artists. In addition to that, following the Third Reich and well into the 1960s and 1970s, scholars in Germany tried to grapple with the reality of what had just taken place. The fear of trivializing the trauma of the murdered artist bars a German connection to this specific kind of art.
Scholars like Adorno or Horkheimer and many, many others connected to the Frankfurter Schule wrote a lot about how the arts can be used to corrupt people, how the arts can function as tools of propaganda. In my estimation, the interpretation of the writings and findings of these scholars in a German cultural context let me ignore how these ideas have morphed into a complete demonization of anything that could be interpreted as escapism, as romanticizing or glorifying any type of mass enjoyment—into suspicion of anything that brings groups of people joy. This is, of course, an oversimplification, and there are tons more elements to this. But that, to me, is a large part of why these categorizations exist in the German cultural context.
MH: Is this why you’ve been drawn to projects that are engaging with pop culture histories?
OMS: Absolutely. I mean, the project I’m doing right now, Hello! Again? is just such a perfect example for this. It is a new jukebox musical using the songs by a German-South African artist named Howard Carpendale. Carpendale had a 40-year career of writing so-called “Schlager” songs in Germany, a very sentimental, romantic genre that is super specific to German speaking pop-music consumption from the 1950s on. It might be most recognizable to U.S. audiences from the Eurovision Song Contest. This type of project rejects the idea of “category,” which has strange effects on the structural and institutional system within which it is being produced. There are people whose job it is in state theaters to check on my work as a director and oversee the artistic output of the institution—if this was a production that they saw are more intellectual, something in the “ernst” category, there would be a ton of discussion about the “value” of this production. And yet, there was little to no talk like that in this production, because it is a musical romantic comedy. All the structures of the show are clear because we know them and recognize them from the entertainment we’ve seen all our lives. But because they are so clear, we take these structures for granted; we don’t even know how to start discussing them. So, for the people I’m working with at these state theaters, there is not much to discuss, because everything is—and now I come to a term I think about a lot—everything is already super accessible.
MH: What does accessible mean to you in the context of German musical theater?
OMS: Everything wants to be understood—that, to me, is at the core of entertainment, of musical theater. Musical theater and entertainment want to be understood. They reach out and say, “come with us, whoever you are, whatever you know, whatever you do.” Musical theater is interested in what we feel; it is meant to be processed emotionally first and intellectually second. And this is a difficult concept to grasp for the standard intellectualized approach in German theater. In a very real way, the people who make theater and performance in Germany don’t have a vocabulary for talking about the musical. It almost feels as if, for folks coming from the “E” camp with their language and context, what is there to discuss?
MH: I’m interested in this idea of who decides if there is a conversation to have in the first place—I’m thinking here about fan communities who find endless content to mine in pop culture objects, who create hugely rich social and intellectual communities.
OMS: This feeds into what I was just talking about. The funding and the structural bodies of these productions have very little incentive to engage with fan communities, in part because of subsidies that allow for so much theater to be produced without concern for profit. They’re very disconnected from popular audiences, which I’m not trying to judge in any way, but the disconnect is palpable. And of course, the people I work for right now are very happy that the Howard Carpendale Fan Club has bought up almost all the tickets for this run of this show. They’re very happy about that in a commercial sense, or in the sense that the show is going well. And that’s wonderful! But to this point, I have not observed any kind of efforts to learn more, to really engage what makes these fans so dedicated to this artist for years, for decades. This isn’t the kind of research that the house dramaturgs are used to discussing. Audience studies, to these institutions, are an economic proposition, not a sociological one.
I was working at a different theater a few months ago and had an exchange with two older women who told me they travel a lot for theater. I told them about this Carpendale jukebox musical, and one of them had a very stark reaction. She said she would not come to that, because she went to the Howard Carpendale goodbye tour 15 years earlier, cried her heart out, and then he just kept touring. And she was so mad that she had a whole emotional breakdown at what he said would be his last tour, and then, like, two years later, he decided to keep going, and she did not forgive him for that. There’s so much potential for thinking about these kinds of stories and how they interact with the cultural objects we create on our stages, but it seems that there’s just a threshold for the way German theaters are organized to enter into those kinds of messy, communal, non-shiny spaces of cultural consumption. Thomas Hermanns, author and co-director of Hello! Again? does this intuitively, and although he is of great notoriety and well-known in Germany, this fact that he engages with these in-between spaces of cultural connectivity never really gets singled out in discussions of his work.
MH: I find it so interesting that, as you’ve argued, any kind of consumption that is not looked at as morally edifying is regarded with suspicion or disinterest, given the deeply weird cultural artefacts that I associate with German pop culture. I’m thinking of David Hasselhoff’s celebrity, or the success of the musical Dance of the Vampires, which flopped when it came from Germany to the US. There are these super camp cultural phenomena that feel SO specific to the German context, but as you’ve said, there isn’t a body of scholarship around that in Germany.
OMS: There’s a saying in Germany that Germans go into the basement to laugh, and I think this very much applies to the consumption of pop culture objects. I did another Thomas Hermanns show called Boybands Forever, which was a revue show using boy-band songs from the 1990s and 2000s—mostly U.S. and UK based, but also German, French, and Belgian. There were thousands of people at these shows enjoying themselves, singing along, screaming, throwing underwear on stage in a kind of echo of the original concerts the show was based on. Some of them were open in celebrating that, but in getting to know fans of the show who would come back again and again, I realized many of them wouldn’t post on social media and treated their attendance like a secret or would justify their visit with qualifications of “guilty pleasure.” I think it’s a major factor in why this threshold exists, because if people are ashamed of going to enjoy something that is such a psychological barrier to break down before there is any possibility of getting a true discourse going about what the medium might mean. What is “guilty” about pleasure? In Germany, we have no vocabulary to describe the social and societal benefit of shared joy. I’m thinking a lot recently about how to get people to take this medium seriously. What I’m realizing is that the best way of taking the medium of the musical seriously is for people to take themselves less seriously.
Dr. Olivia Maria Schaaf is a director and theatre scholar from Berlin whose research focuses on musical theatre in Germany. Her ultimate life goal is slapping Andrew Lloyd Webber in the face.
Martha Henzy is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan where she researches violence and witness in contemporary literature and visual culture.
Artist Photo by Kirsten Nijhof
Allow Me to Introduce is our recurring feature that makes space for authors to elevate, punctuate, and nuance our reception of the work of artists, writers, and scholars that are worthy of our attention but otherwise underdiscussed. Authors might introduce readers to new works or forthcoming publications, lesser noted themes across an artist’s body of work, or work that emerges form niche and sub-cultural fields that might otherwise escape our attention. This feature can take the form of either an essay about the artist/work or an interview with the artist/writer.
This interview has been edited for clarity.