ABSTRACT
Drama both theatre and opera has been the backbone of German culture since the late eighteenth century and remains so today. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Friedrich Schiller indeed claimed that a truly national theatre was critical to Germany becoming a nation state, while giving German theatre the serious, moral and uplifting intent that underlies its importance to national culture. Photography encouraged the greater realism of the naturalist theatre, and its greater awareness of light contributed to the chiaroscuro style of the expressionist movement that followed. Adolf Linnebach's design for the Dresden Hoftheater of 1914 used sinking and sliding stages along with a revolve, making scene changes much quicker, though cheap labour in the 1920s meant that much was still also done manually. The Nazis introduced strict controls on theatre, taking over organisations like the debt-ridden Volksbühne, and subsuming drama into spectacle.
