Abstract

This dissertation examines dramatic and philosophical representations of identity in Germany, encompassing topics as diverse as enlightenment, pedagogy, and subjectivity on the on hand, and history, culture, and the body on the other. Juxtaposing drama's theoretical participation in Enlightenment discourse and its theatrical practice from Lessing to Brecht reveals the historic tension between enlightenment universalism and questions of identity in German culture. Exploring these cultural issues also sheds light on questions of Enlightenment's history and on drama as a genre. ;These issues emerge out of Theodor W. Adorno's critique of the German Enlightenment as found in his texts on negative dialectics, aesthetics, and poetics; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's pedagogical, aesthetic, and dramatic writings; and Brecht's critique of German drama as developed in his early and teaching-plays and examples of his epic works. By historicizing Brecht and Adorno through Lessing, both appear less as representatives of opposing notions of Marxist aesthetics , than as critics struggling with the fate of subjectivity, and the meanings of History in the wake of the traumas of twentieth century German history. Viewed from this perspective, Brecht and Adorno are shown to be almost as concerned with questions rooted in pedagogical issues that informed eighteenth century German drama as with twentieth century politics. ;A structural reading of the poetics, subjectivity and philosophy of history of Adorno and Brecht reveals that each strove for new notions of historicity. In this redefinition of history, the projects of Brecht and Adorno are fundamentally complementary, in that Brecht's theater of painful cultural awareness answers Adorno's call to confront history as catastrophe