German drama and theater in German-speaking countries today -- I. Performance and theory. Incoherence as meaning: from the real to the explosive -- Sign and referent in the work of Robert Wilson: reconstituting the human form -- Forging a link between stage and world: the genre of director's drama -- Spatio-temporality as theater performance -- The uses of audience participation: theater's engagement in social experience -- Building an audience: Craig's and Brecht's theories of dramatic performance -- II. Expressionism. Georg Kaiser's Von Morgens bis Mitternachts as a metaphor for chaos -- Ernst Toller's Masse-Mensch: the individual versus the collective -- Hasenclever's Sinnenglück und Seelenfrieden as metaphor for suicide -- Reinhard Goering's Seeschlacht and the expressionist vision -- Mankind and Sun: German-American expressionism -- Expressionism and deconstructionism: a critical comparison -- Arnolt Bronnen's austro-expressionist war plays -- III. Third Reich. The theater in and out of the Third Reich: the German stage "In [entitled] Extremis" - Anti war discourse in war drama: Sigmund Graff and Die endlose Strasse --An "ancient German rediscovered": the Nazi Widukind plays of Forster and Kiss -- Stages of reform: Caroline Neuber/Die Neuberin in the Third Reich -- Gewalt, Gott, Natur, Volk: the performance of Nazi ideology in Kolbenheyer's Gregor und Heinrich -- Gerhart Hauptmann's Ratten (1911) at the Rose (1936) -- Rules, regulations, and the Reich: comedy under the auspices of the Propaganda Ministry -- IV. Bertolt Brecht. The performance of ideology and dialectics in Brecht's Life of Galileo -- Reviving Brecht: transformations, or the reciprocity of outward signs and inward states -- Saving the fallen city of Mahagonny: the musical elaboration of Brecht's epic theater -- Brecht's gestic vision for the opera: why the shock of recognition is more powerful in the Rise and fall of the city of Mahagonny than in The three penny opera -- Brecht's Life of Galileo as a Aristotelian tragedy -- Post-World War II. Max Frisch's The great wall of China and the language of re-emergence -- A fictional response to political circumstance: Martin Walser's The rabbit race Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Das Opfer Helena: another triumph of the "they" VI. Contemporary. Cry Beyond the Hamlets: Peter Handke's dramatic poem and the tragic tradition The rebellion of the body against the effects of ideas: Heiner Müller's concept of tragedy -- Darkness visible: Peter Turrini and the scripted life -- Woman takes center stage: three versions of "The female condition" on the German theater stage today -- The representation of foreigners in German and Austrian plays of the 1990s by female playwrights -- Conquering the south pole and other places in Germany: Manfred Karge's plays