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Travel Writing and Cultural Transfer
Edited by Petra Broomans and Jeanette den Toonder
[FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures 20] 2024
► pp. 104–134

Chapter 5
Theatre as an engine for German-Swedish cultural transfer in the early twentieth century

Max Reinhardt’s and Alexander Moissi’s guest performances in Stockholm

| Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg,
It was not only literary exchange and travel writing that flourished between Germany and Scandinavia around 1900. The theatre sector was also influenced by increasing artistic mobility that facilitated the transfer of ideas on modern theatre across Europe. This chapter examines selected guest performances and directorships of the German theatre director Max Reinhardt and the actor Alexander Moissi in Stockholm between 1915 and 1921. Expanding the traditional idea of travel writing, the artists used guest performances as a means of allowing ideas to travel to a new national context. Using cultural transfer and mobility theories, the aim of this contribution is to explore how Reinhardt’s and Moissi’s mobile acts brought cultural and aesthetic ideas to Sweden and which factors – social, political, aesthetic as well as infrastructural – influenced the transfer process. This is done with a content analysis of newspaper articles as primary sources. With the help of these sources, I will illustrate that Reinhardt’s and Moissi’s visits to Sweden were only successful because of a well-developed German-Scandinavian network that had been built beforehand. It is argued that the artistic ideas that they transferred to Sweden were mainly affected by socio-cultural and infrastructural developments, while political ideologies were of secondary importance.
Keywords: cultural transfer, mobility, retransfer, travelling theatre, metropolitan culture, modern theatre, contact zone
Article outline
  • Internationalisation of and political impacts on theatre in the early twentieth century
  • Cultural transfer and mobility in theatre studies: An understudied phenomenon
  • Nationality vs. Internationality: Cultural transfer in Reinhardt’s and Moissi’s Stockholm productions
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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