Performing Unification

Praise / Awards

• "Cornish skillfully examines the neo-documentary style of groups like Rimini Protokoll and the “hybridized” post-migrant theater. More than 60 pages of notes, bibliography, and index lend the book authority...Highly recommended."
  --Choice Reviews
• "Cornish offers exemplary readings of important, recent productions. The book makes a significant contribution to German studies, where theater tends to get short shrift; and to theater studies, where scholars have been both intrigued and baffled by German directors’ irreverent approach to classical texts and nationalist myth-making.”
  --German Studies Review
• "Performing Unification is written clearly, is attentive to its reader...and avoids obscuring its findings in jargon. It provides a stimulating and accessible way into an otherwise dense and difficult topic and will reward the reader wishing to extend Cornish’s findings. This study will be useful not just for researchers with an interest in theatre’s relationship to history and memory but also for those looking for perspectives on aesthetic developments in German theatre in the last thirty years."
  --Modern Drama
• "Matt Cornish has written a very good investigation into history and nation on the German stage after 1989 ... He arrives at some fascinating conclusions."
  --The German Quarterly
• "Required reading for anyone seeking to engage with either the specifics of theatre’s responses to German unification or, more generally, with how theatre confronts monumental upheaval."
  --TDR
• "Matt Cornish's essential volume now makes this field more accessible to Anglophone scholars and allows for a thorough understanding of both textual and performative responses to the milestone historical turn of 1989 and after, in a manner that is rewarding and enlightening even to those familiar with the subject."
  --Monatshefte
• "Performing Unification refreshingly explores theater’s resourceful and diverse capacities to imagine, shape, counter and remediate political history."
  --Symposium
• "This monograph presents an authoritative account of recent German theatre that will serve as a key reference point for scholars and students working

  in the field. While many of the individual plays and productions will be familiar to experts from other accounts, Cornish has integrated his discussion into a

  broad, ambitious analysis, interpreting theatre in the light of developments in historiography, curation, and memory culture. The narrative that he crafts is compelling, and it deserves a broad readership."

  --Theatre Journal
• Winner: American Library Association (ALA) 2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

• Table of Contents