Theater and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany

In 1767, Hamburg chartered the first Deutsches Nationaltheater. Michael Sosulski connects the performance of body discipline by professional actors, soldiers, and schoolchildren to the growing interest in German national identity, long before Germany's incorporation as a nation-state. Through the efforts of literary intellectuals and advocates, including G.E. Lessing and Friedrich Schiller, the Nationaltheater emerged as an ideal space in which to imagine the nation, because for Germans, nationality emerged as a performed identity.