ABSTRACT
Plays with historical themes enjoyed great success in the late 1920s and early 1930s across all the main theatres in Vienna. Although historical drama continued to be staged after 1933, this chapter focuses on the unstable later years of the First Republic from around 1929 to 1933, when a discernible trend first becomes evident. Literary and historical research on mainstream culture in Austria broadly concurs in identifying an 'historical turn' in political and intellectual life at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. The new vogue for historical drama in Vienna fulfils three related functions in the theatre of the period. The chapter demonstrates institutional developments at the Burgtheater lie behind the rather ambiguous outward dimensions of the trend for historical drama. These institutional developments are gradual for the most part, and their relationship to the trend of historical drama is subtle.
