Performing in Crisis Mode: the Munich National Theater, the Great Exhibition and the Cholera Epidemic in 1854

• Authors: Wagner Meike

Title variants

EN

Performing in Crisis Mode: the Munich National Theater, the Great Exhibition and the Cholera Epidemic in 1854

Abstracts

EN

In 1854, the city of Munich had arranged for the “First General German Industrial Exhibition” to promote German industry to the world and invited a global audience to the event. At the same time, Franz Dingelstedt, director of the National Theater, organized a festival displaying the finest actors from Germany. Right after the opening of the festival, cholera started raging in the city and leaving 3,000 deaths in the final count. The author sketches out the role of the theatre in this crisis, when Dingelstedt was ordered by the king to keep the theatre open at any cost. This appears awkward, in regard to the current global pandemic crisis where theaters have been identified as risk zones for infection and consequently closed down. Why was the theatre at the time considered a safe and appropriate place even helping to counter the disease?

Keywords

EN

cholera epidemic; German theater; theater history 1800-1900; National Theater in Munich; Franz von Dingelstedt; medical and health discourse

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Sztuki PAN
• Journal: Pamiętnik Teatralny
• Year: 2020
• Issue: 4(276)
• Pages: 39-61

Contributors

author

Wagner Meike

• Stockholm University

References

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• Davis, T. C. (1998). Filthy – Nay – Pestilential. Sanitation and Victorian Theaters. In D. Pollock (ed.), Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History (pp. 161-186). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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Identifiers

DOI

10.36744/pt.561