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JAN L. HAGENS contradiction between content and form, between what it says and how it relays that message, were it not for its realization on stage, in live theater.? Once dramas inherent tendency toward becoming theater has been realized in performance, the affinity between dramatic texts, theater, and ritual can be made explicit and become experiential. As Saskia Fischer has laid out convincingly in her recent Ritual und Ritualitat im Drama nach 1945, theater can reflect on and instantiate this close relation between drama, performance, and ritual.’ In fact, in post-1945 Germany, Austria, and even Switzerland — after Nazi culture had annexed ritual for its own reactionary purposes between 1933 and 1945 — politically conscious theater had no choice but to reflect on its own relation to ritual. Ritual could only be reappropriated for progressive purposes through a highly reflexive approach that would interweave the practices of ritual and its critique. In order not to remain tentative, partial, and arbitrary, German-language post-war theater would eventually have to turn ritual into a self-aware practice, elevating ritual to become theater’s own core around which to dynamically construct the aesthetics of its entire performance. Within the dramatic genre, when we think of how various sub-genres employ ritual, the strategies that first come to mind are tragic, as in the communal rite of sacrificing, or of expelling the scapegoat, or of killing the aged king. The connection between ritual sacrifice and tragedy has of course been extensively researched, by scholars such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Karl Meuli, Walter Burkert, René Girard, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Anton Bierl, and Wolfgang Braungart. In this respect, research sometimes neglects to make a distinction that is important and should be stressed. On the one hand, there is a historical and genealogical thesis regarding the origins of drama: that, to use Northrop Frye’s terms from his Anatomy of Criticism, ritual fused with myth and thus became drama (and that thus drama saved ritual from going extinct); or that, to use Victor Turner’s famous but not clearly distinguishing terms, “liminal” ritual developed into “liminoid” tragic drama (and in fact, did this twice, in ancient Greece and in late medieval Europe).* On the other 2 Fora more detailed analysis of the pragmatic contradiction between drama and performance, see Jan L. Hagens: Text and Presentation: How Do They Relate?, in Text and Presentation XIX (1998), 52-62. For a more complex analysis of the relation between text and performance, see Richard Schechner: Drama, Script, Theatre and Performance, in Essays in Performance Theory 1970-1976, New York, Drama Book Specialists, 1977, 36-62. Saskia Fischer: Ritual und Ritualität im Drama nach 1945: Brecht, Frisch, Dürrenmatt, Sachs, Weiss, Hochhuth, Handke, Paderborn, Fink, 2019. Saskia Fischer and Birgit Mayer insist that works of art can at the same time engage in ritual and critically reflect upon ritual; see Saskia Fischer — Birgit Mayer (eds.): Einführung, in Kunst-Rituale — Ritual-Kunst. Zur Ritualität von Theater, Literatur und Musik in der Moderne, Würzburg, Kônigshausen & Neumann, 2019, 7-16, 12. For a more detailed description of “liminal” and “liminoid,” as well as many illustrations (from Italian, French, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Medieval European, and Roman drama) of « 58 ¢
