Theater of the Void

Plasticity, Hauntology, and Nuclear Blast

Teresa Kovacs

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781501781407
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: Literature

Theater of the Void explores contemporary German theater in the aftermath of the technology of the atomic bomb. Informed by threats of total annihilation—whether through nuclear technology or, more recently, global warming—German-language theater since the late 1970s encounters the void not as empty space or nothingness but as the possibility of radical transformation. Theater of the Void investigates theatrical forms that transform fundamental categories of time, space, and causality in light of the ontological and epistemological shifts of the nuclear age.

Teresa Kovacs focuses on four directors and playwrights whose works offer insights into the theater of the void: Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief, and René Pollesch. Kovacs shows that contemporary German theater has not turned away from the sciences after Hiroshima and Nagasaki but has remained entangled with scientific thinking about quantum physics, biology, and the environment. Investigating these entanglements, Theater of the Void finds in the works of these German theater-makers a grammar of the void that speaks to the possibilities of a transformed theater in the Anthropocene.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. In a Flash
• 2. Falling Out of Time and Space
• 3. End Times and the End of Time
• 4. Darkness, Movement, and Metamorphosis
• 5. D-Dramatik or “Darwin-Type Theater”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index