The March of Time, or Time to March: Tash Siddiqui is stimulated by a lively analysis of recent German history laced with black humour

Review of Barry Emslie, Speculations on German History: Culture and the State (Camden House, 2015).

November 2016, Volume 10, Number 3, 86–90.

At least since Schiller and Wagner formulated their conceptions of theatre and opera, the German notion of culture contained a fundamental contradiction. For instance, Schiller’s convictions were derived from the idea of freedom, and an almost anarchistic belief in individual self-realisation; yet his 1784 essay ‘Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet’ (The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution) outlined a paradoxical notion of theatre at the service of the Volk’s moral ideals. On the one hand, Germans believed deeply in the transcendental inviolability of culture and in the autonomy of art. But they held a contradictory conception of culture as political in the broadest sense, a conviction that it both answered to and must be used to bolster the deepest spiritual values of the Volk.