Hailing a Racial Kinship

The fifth chapter, ‘Hailing a Racial Kinship: Performances of Greek Tragedies during the Third Reich’, interprets the Olympic Games in Berlin (1936) and Lothar Müthel’s production of the Oresteia as part of it as the attempt to present Nazi Germany as the genuine heir of ancient Greece. It also discusses the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon that, during the war until the closing-down of all theatres in September 1944, 16 productions of Antigone were mounted with a total of 150 performances. Taking Karl Heinz Stroux’s 1940 production at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus Berlin as an example, the author discusses whether performances of Greek tragedies in times of war were meant and able to divert the Bildungsbürger from the ongoing atrocities and to reconcile them with the Nazis, or whether they provided a forum for resistance.

Alter Orbis

This chapter focuses on the thought of historian E. A. Freeman. It starts by dissecting some of Freeman's arguments about time, space, and politics. It then analyzes his views on racial kinship and empire, focusing initially on his critique of the idea of imperial federation, one of the most prominent political debates of the 1880s and 1890s, before moving to his alternative conceptualization of global order. Freeman argued that dismantling the British settler empire was both a matter of justice and a precondition for establishing the proper sense of racial “brotherhood” necessary to realize the higher purpose of the English-speaking peoples. The manifest destiny of the race was thus premised on recognition of the deep unity of Britain and the United States.