ABSTRACT
The action of ancient tragedy is based on the two forces of conflict and suffering. In conflict and suffering above all the old events of saga acquire in the area of tragic dialogue their new dramatic-dialectic effectiveness. Philological scholarship in the different countries of our continent is striving today to find the right interpretation of the essence of tragedy and the tragic. For the other side to this phenomenon of an immediate stage presence of the Greek tragedians in our time can only be understood from our own temporary historical position, which is also the position of our theatre today. The intellectual movement that created the spiritual prerequisite for the reception on the German stage of Shakespeare as well as of Greek tragedy was Romanticism, and the deepened historical sense which, following Herder, was called for above all by the Romantics.
