
Why is Germany so obsessed with Hamlet? - lermontov
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2015/11/why-germany-so-obsessed-hamlet
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PinguTS
Germany is obsessed with Hamlet? Don't think so. Hamlet is presumably as often
played as other classics like Goethe's Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther,
and William Tell. That are the ones that are also read and learned in school.
But I had never to read Shakespeare.

This article has a very limited view and such tells a wrong story. Don't know
what is the intention behind.

Personally, I still know parts out of mind from Faust and William Tell, but
don't know anything from Shakespeare.

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codingbinary
Same here. I couldn't care less about Hamlet or other works by Shakespeare.
And I cannot recall any of my other friends having _any_ tendency towards
Hamlet at all.

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phphphph
How old are you, if I may ask?

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codingbinary
29, why?

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phphphph
I started to care about the stuff we read in school in my early thirties
(Shakespeare would be an exception, for ... reasons).

There's a special exception for Max Frisch which I discovered mid-twenties and
was very thankful I did _not_ have to read it in school.

So, well, the "why" is: maybe later in your life.

(There's another "why" in "you an your friends aren't necessarily
representative for Germany as a whole, bit that would have been a rather cheap
comment)

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cm2187
Nothing in comparison with the UK.

The UK only has a single author, poet and source of inspiration for period
movies: Shakespeare. Theatres only run musicals and Shakespeare. British
litterature is either Harry Potter or Shakespeare. And if a Brit must quote a
classic, it must be Shakespeare.

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SkyAtWork
I find that a stretch. Oscar Wilde is at least as quotable, though I suppose
the Brits categorize him as Irish instead. How about Orwell? Lewis Carroll?
Jane Austen? Emily Bronte? William Blake? There's enough Sherlock clones
around that it's hard to overlook Arthur Conan Doyle? Tolkien? Douglas Adams?
CS Lewis? Mary Shelley? Virginia Woolf? Heck, Francis Bacon (unless you buy
the theory that he doubles as Shakespeare).

Literature is not what the English lack!

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cm2187
I am not saying no one wrote anything else. I am merely pointing that I only
hear about Shakespeare.

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lyschoening
The average German, when asked to list works by Shakespeare, can probably name
Hamlet and maybe Romeo and Juliet. That does not make it an obsession.

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usrusr
At first I was very confused by this alleged Hamlet obsession. For many
Germans, the number one source of knowing about Shakespeare is him getting
quoted a lot in Star Trek. Followed by that one Berlin wall/Romeo and Juliet
crossover Asterix story.

But if someone writes about the stage art scene, then the german stage art
scene becomes "Germany" and suddenly it all makes prefect sense. Classics get
reinterpreted to add new twists, but that only really works if the original
material is sufficiently well known to the audience. It's hardly surprising
that in a country with a different language (and different literary tradition)
than English, only few of the works of Shakespeare reach that threshold.

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cafard
I find myself thinking of the uncle in "Withnail and I", who quit acting once
he figured out that "I should never play the Dane." So the English-speaking
world has its own obsession.

