ABSTRACT
After its idealistic beginnings, its Blütezeit between the wars and its encouraging Neues Beginnen (in Nestriepke’s optimistic phrase) the story of the final years of the Volksbühne movement can only be told, echoing Edward Gibbon, as the History of its Decline and Fall, and just as the Roman Empire did not disintegrate only because of internal strife and the personalities of individual Emperors, so too, the fate of the Volksbühne was determined not only by internal factors, important though these were, but also by broader currents of modern German history.
