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GERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVES
SPEAKER: Sophie Schweiger, Yale University
When composing the dramatis personae for his play Der Schwierige (The Difficult Man, 1918), Hugo von Hofmannsthal forgot to name one character. In fact, he left out the reluctant villain, who—in line with G. E. Lessing’s dramaturgy of theater “without a villain”—does not exist, at least not in human form. Rather, the Difficult Gentleman’s antagonist reveals itself to be a machine: his private telephone.
Famously, Hofmannsthal’s voice was one of the first author’s to be recorded on tape; he also was one of the first and very few who owned a telephone as soon as the technology became available for private homes, and he embraced new technologies within artistic contexts. And yet: the technology pervading his popular post-war comedy appears as an awful nuisance. Set in a fictionalized “1917”—the war has already ended, and Habsburg rule appears restored and largely unscathed—Kari Bühl’s telephone exists to disrupt. It is the rude effet de réel that reminds the aristocracy on stage that something has come to an end—the privacy of one’s home, an existence without interruption, the era of civilized conversation.
With an utterly demanding telephone pestering and indeed co-directing the personnel on stage, Hofmannsthal’s Der Schwierige negotiates the effect new technologies have on acting bodies, on stage and off. This raises questions that, a hundred years later, have renewed relevance. To what degree does new technology disrupt a theater’s intradiegetic privacy? And can strategies of disruption and a theater that embraces its connection to the network help the stage regain political relevance?
About the Speaker
Sophie Johanna Schweiger is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University with a dissertation on the role of gestures in literature, film, and performance in 2021 and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University for one year before moving to Yale. Her research focuses on theater, drama theory and the study of performance, inter- and trans-mediality, (post-)apocalyptic narratives, and committed literature. She has recently published on Arthur Schnitzler, “Corseted Choristry. Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen as Chor(e)ography,” German Quarterly (2021), and on emojis and Black Lives Matter: “📚 = 💀? Digital Schreibzeug & Emoji Activism,” Germanic Review (2023). Currently, she is working on her first book, in which gesture informs the study of trans-mediality and media difference.
