A Peace Play in Wartime Germany? Pacifism in Franz Werfel’s The Trojan Women, Berlin 1916

Euripides’ The Trojan Women, first performed in Athens in 415 BC, has been embraced by western culture as a peace play throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. During the First World War, the play was performed using two different versions — in 1915, British classicist Gilbert Murray’s 1905 translation from the Greek toured America and in 1916 Austrian poet Franz Werfel’s 1914 adaptation was staged in Berlin. Scholars have claimed that both were anti-war productions. This article will demonstrate that in fact neither can be interpreted unambiguously as a ‘peace play’ and that Werfel’s version in Berlin 1916 was neither presented nor understood at the time of its performance as a condemnation of the War or of Germany’s role in it. As well as shedding light on what has long been an apparently intriguing but largely unexamined anomaly in cultural censorship in wartime Berlin, this case study challenges a logocentric, literary approach to the play as text and serves to illustrate the importance of the para-textual framing, as well as the context and staging of a specific performance, in determining its reception and the meanings it creates.