Backstage negotiations: Dramatists and theatre reform in the late GDR

From a playwright’s perspective, drama was doubly disadvantaged in the GDR: subject to both publication and performance censorship. This article focuses on the campaign for theatre reform from 1987-9, which was spearheaded by dramatists within the Academy of Arts, including Irina Liebmann, Christoph Hein and Rudi Strahl. It explores the arguments that dramatists used to challenge the institutional framework in which new plays were performed and received, and the insights that these arguments offer into the fraught relationship between GDR drama and theatre. Whilst the campaign for an ‘Authors’ Theatre’ foundered due to the authorities’ thinly-veiled opposition and differences within the theatre community, officials in the Culture Ministry then attempted to take charge of the reform process. In 1988 and 1989, the Ministry made key concessions to reformers and intervened to secure performances of new plays, in some cases forging local alliances in order to overcome resistance within regional administrations. Whilst the extent of the Ministry’s commitment to perestroika is debatable, its officials’ actions confirmed that the terms of theatre censorship were open for renegotiation.