JONAS TINIUS, 2023, State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 290 pp., ISBN 978-1-009-32112-9

KEYWORDS: Theatre, performance, ethics, migration, Germany

Jonas Tinius’s State of the Arts (2023) tells the story of Theater an der Ruhr (“the Theater” hereafter), a public repertory theatre ensemble based in the Ruhr Valley in North Rhine-Westphalia founded by Roberto Ciulli, an émigré philosopher and self-taught director who moved from Italy to Germany in the 1960s. Ciulli founded the Theater specifically as “a theatre of and for the Bastardo,” meaning those without a fatherland or a mother tongue, and to challenge the predominant framing of cultural production through the category of the nation (p. 3). The theatre operates on the economic model instituted in the German Kulturstaat, with funding and other support from the regional municipality. This economic model allows the Theater to pursue artistic production aimed at “a long-term process of self-cultivation altogether unrelated to profitability” (p. 87). The Theater has a stable in-house ensemble of artists and crew who stay with the Theater for years if not decades and a set of “repertoire,” or “stock plays,” that is repeatedly rehearsed and performed over the years. This stability of the ensemble and its repertoire encourages dramaturgs and actors to cultivate, ethically and artistically, longer-term relations with their repertoire and their roles.

Tinius theorizes Theater an der Ruhr as an exemplary institution of contemporary German public theatre that is situated at the interstices of important German cultural-intellectual traditions, yet ethically and artistically committed to pursuing a political otherwise. Artistically, the Theater challenges the expected identification of actors with their roles; politically, the Theater challenges the category of the nation that fundamentally underpins conventional understandings of cultural identity in modern Germany. The Theater is committed first and foremost to the art of theatre, for which ethical self-cultivation must be enacted and through which political engagement would be facilitated. Through in-depth ethnographic description and anthropological analysis of professional performance practices under the Theater and its aegis, Tinius productively puts into conversation the anthropology of ethics, theatre/art, and migration and simultaneously offers an invaluable contribution to the field of Performance Studies, in which serious theoretical engagement with professional practices of performance remains surprisingly rare. The book would be of great interest to anthropologists of ethics, art, migration, and citizenship, as well as scholars of German Studies and Performance Studies.

In Chapter 1, Tinius outlines a genealogy of Bildung in German intellectual and political history. Bildung describes a longstanding German tradition of self-cultivation and self-realization conceptualized and developed by a series of thinkers, including Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, many of whom were deeply involved in theatre. While diverse and heterogeneous in nuances, Tinius emphasizes that the core idea of Bildung is not apolitical or anti-political but constitutes a particular political stance that promotes an introspective critical relation with the self. It holds as a primary principle that the bettering of oneself should precede, but not preclude, the care for others for the greater common good. Theater an der Ruhr, Tinius argues, constitutes not a direct extension of Bildung traditions but, rather, a response to them.

Chapters 2 and 3 develop the core theoretical argument of the book by elaborating on what Tinius calls the “ethico-aesthetic