The structures of the theater and of what is considered “performable” don’t stay contained within the walls of the institutions of theater: they both manifest and affirm certain philosophical, social, and political conditions. At least since Brecht, German theater has become aware that dramatic and performative forms possess political gravity. They mirror, implement, and affirm forms of spectatorship and conditions of appearance that dictate who and what is allowed to appear on stage and in public––and to appear as what, ––as well as the relation spectators develop with what is happening in front of their eyes.

Yet, some plays have boldly disobeyed those norms of performance, remaining nevertheless essentially theatrical. Those plays––sometimes simply breaking the norms, sometimes staging them––often bring the theoretical and political “backstage” of their theater to the limelight. Recent works in performance studies, for example, by Judith Butler, have pointed out that “unperformability” harbors the threat not only of a failed performance, but of endangering the hidden mechanism of what is considered “performable” in both intentional performative spaces and in the public space. Instances of unperformability––in texts that are written for a stage––often call attention to the expectations, forms, and conditions of performance: the dramaturgical and aesthetic conditions of those stages, as well as the philosophical and political conditions of those theaters and the public that was training its gazes in them.

Our panel focuses on unperformability in the theater: not as a step outside of the theater, but rather as a phenomenon that is deeply engaged with theatricality, presenting and challenging the conditions of performance from within. Gathering scholars who have been working on unperformability from different disciplinary angles, the presentations in our panel explore how instances of unperformability in the theater serve to negotiate the conditions of appearance in different aesthetic, philosophical, and social contexts: the dramaturgical unstageability of classical texts; the unperformability of nature and gods on the stage of the Anthropocene; the epistemological and metaphysical violence that unperformable plays showcase and challenge; as well as the political and social structures of the public space that unperformability brings center-stage.

We, a group of young German literature scholars from across different universities, have discovered that we all are dedicating our current projects to unperformable and unstageable plays, and felt that we should create a place for discussion, collaborative work, and exchange that sharpens and benefits our individual work, as well as create a body of discourse and scholarship on the topic. We are proposing a panel that presents the various texts and angles through which we have been exploring unperformability. Bryson Tedford’s presentation reconsiders the genre of Romantic Drama through the lens of Tieck’s unstageable dramaturgy, through an examination of Tieck’s staging of Der gestiefelte Kater (Dresden, 1844). Saurab Pal presents his work on Hölderlin’s play “The Death of Empedocles”, and the unperformability of nature and gods on the stage of the Anthropocene. Netta Sovinsky reads Hölderlin’s Empedokles again as a spectacle of disappearance, following how instances of unperformability in the play present and challenge the metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions of its contemporary philosophy and its political space. Leonie Ettinger analyzes Brecht's play The Measures Taken to expose a contradiction between Brecht's theoretical and practical approaches: his political ambition to lead people to socialism without directly influencing them is incompatible with his dogmatic aesthetic approach and becomes unstageable.