ABSTRACT
The application of racial theories in a performance context was a new dimension during the Third Reich, while the lively discourse around theatre and its role in society was not. On the occasion of the Reich Theatre Festival in Vienna in June 1938, Joseph Goebbels claimed that Germany was "the mother country of world theatre" and the one nation on earth which had always provided the necessary theatrical impulses and innovations. With an increasing number of theatres being taken over into municipal ownership after the First World War and under the auspices of the new democratic Weimar Republic, city councils also became acutely aware of the possibilities their provision of funding offered. The theoretical discourse around theatre, performance and dramaturgy did not have any lasting effects and failed to create a genuine National Socialist dramatic theory. By the mid-1940s a more general discourse had emerged which embedded Germany's leadership in theatrical matters in a European perspective.
