Competing Germanies

Following World War II, German antifascists and nationalists in Buenos Aires believed theater was crucial to their highly politicized efforts at community-building, and each population devoted considerable resources to competing against its rival onstage. Competing Germanies tracks the paths of several stage actors from European theaters to Buenos Aires and explores how two of Argentina's most influential immigrant groups, German nationalists and antifascists (Jewish and non-Jewish), clashed on the city's stages. Covered widely in German- and Spanish-language media, theatrical performances articulated strident Nazi, antifascist, and Zionist platforms. Meanwhile, as their thespian representatives grappled onstage for political leverage among emigrants and Argentines, behind the curtain, conflicts simmered within partisan institutions and among theatergoers. Publicly they projected unity, but offstage nationalist, antifascist, and Zionist populations were rife with infighting on issues of political allegiance, cultural identity and, especially, integration with their Argentine hosts.

Competing Germanies reveals interchange and even mimicry between antifascist and nationalist German cultural institutions. Furthermore, performances at both theaters also fit into contemporary invocations of diasporas, including taboos and postponements of return to the native country, connections among multiple communities, and forms of longing, memory, and (dis)identification. Sharply divergent at first glance, their shared condition as cultural institutions of emigrant populations caused the antifascist Free German Stage and the nationalist German Theater to adopt parallel tactics in community-building, intercultural relationships, and dramatic performance.

Its cross-cultural, polyglot blend of German, Jewish, and Latin American studies gives Competing Germanies a wide, interdisciplinary academic appeal and offers a novel intervention in Exile studies through the lens of theater, in which both victims of Nazism and its adherents remain in focus.

Robert Kelz is Associate Professor of German and Associate Director of International Studies at the University of Memphis. He is co-author of Paul Walther Jacob y las Musicas Prohibidas durante el Nazismo.

Robert Kelz provides a quite different and novel slant in his splendid study of German exile literature from an earlier age. [...] Keltz offers a cross-cultural, polyglot blend of German, Jewish and Latin-American polemic that will be welcomed by cultural historians and students of international affairs.

It is a book overflowing with data, rich in the perspectives it opens up and with new information, an original contribution to studies on Nazis and anti-Nazis in Argentina

In this impressive study, Robert Kelz portrays the cultural landscape and rivaling constituencies of German Argentina through the lens of theater performances. [...] In accessible and nuanced scholarly prose, Kelz presents the results of impeccable and extensive research, which he conducted in public archives and private collections in Argentina, Austria, and Germany

By offering insight into the workings of German immigrant theater in Argentina, Competing Germanies adds a much-needed cultural dimension and revives discourses over German-Argentine relations before and after 1945. The interdisciplinary and transnational nature of this text will be most useful to scholars working in history, Jewish culture and society, arts and/in exile, and theater and performance studies, and will establish a point of departure for related research projects in these and other areas

A real strength of the book is the centering of theater and performance. It allows Kelz to document the nature of the German-speaking communities that emerged and to analyze how performance itself transmitted a sense of cultural identification. [...] Overall, this book's focus on theater allows Kelz to illuminate a broader history of German cultural production in Buenos Aires over three decades in the midtwentieth century and the interplay between institutions and larger communities

Although Competing Germanies is a highly specialized study, it has broad implications and should elicit wide interest, especially given current global migrant and refugee crises. What this book illustrates so clearly is that anyone can become a refugee at any time and that all the world is but a stage wherein men and women are merely players with exit and entrance visas.

Frank Trommler, University of Pennsylvania, author of The German-American Encounter:

Robert Kelz's Competing Germanies is an outstanding accomplishment. It represents a new stage of scholarship about German exile literature where the political and cultural confrontations of a period are seen in their full complexity.

Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, author of Reimagining the European Family:

Competing Germanies is an insightful, lucid, and highly compelling book. It will appeal to a wide audience in German and European studies, theater and performance studies, migration studies, Jewish studies, and historians with an interest in immigration in South America.