Theatre: Stratford-on-Rhine

When Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, one of his problems was to satisfy the German passion for music and drama without indulging the non-Aryan composers, playwrights and directors who were to a large degree responsible for them. Music was comparatively easy, for Germany's favorite composer is romantic, loud, Aryan Richard Wagner. Every year at Bayreuth the Führer turns up and sits raptly listening to Tristan und Isolde. But Germany's favorite dramatist is an Elizabethan Englishman: William Shakespeare. And Shakespeare's foremost German producer before Adolf Hitler was a Jewish director, Max Reinhardt, whose summer theatre at Salzburg once ranked with Bayreuth as an international attraction for tourists.

Last fortnight, in the colonnaded courtyard of the ruined castle of Heidelberg, on the Rhine, Germans saw their Führers answer to the problem of German drama. Heidelberg's Reich Festival, a good Nazi undertaking, is now in its sixth year. It has simply taken over Shakespeare, ignoring Salzburg and the Reinhardt tradition. Heidelberg has a Shakespeare tradition of its own: one of the castle's towers was built by Frederick V as a theatre for his wife Elizabeth (daughter of England's James I), and there Shakespeare's plays were presented in his own lifetime, before the rest of Europe knew his name.

Few foreigners saw the Heidelberg Festival. But the courtyard was packed with German tourists, mostly guests of the Nazi Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) organization, and Reich Minister of Propaganda Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was conspicuously present in the front row. Before the festival ends next week they will see three native German dramas: Josef von Eichendorff's Die Freier, Friedrich von Schiller's Die Räuber, Gerhart Hauptmann's Florian Geyer. But Shakespeare is the main dish. A Midsummer Night's Dream opened the festival, was scheduled for 21 performances in all.

To non-Teutonic ears, its lyric lines in the classical August Wilhelm von Schlegel translation sound more like Schimpfwort (invective) than Shakespeare. Sample:

Ich weiss 'nen Hügel, wo man Quendel

pflückt,

Wo aus dem Gras Viol 'und Masslieb

nickt.

Wo dicht gewölbt des Geisblatts üpp'ge

Schatten

Mit Hagedorn und mit Jasmin sich

gatten:

. . . Dort ruht Titania halbe Nächte kühl

In Lauben, eingewiegt durch Tanz und

Spiel.*