He shaped the theater as it is today: Hans-Thies Lehmann, theorist of “post-dramatic theatre”, is dead.
It is a rare exception that a theater scholar, of all people, shaped an entire style of theater and a generation of theater makers. Hans-Thies Lehmann was this exception.
In the 1980s, together with his first wife Genia Schulz, who died young, he shaped the West German reception of what was considered scandalous at the time Heiner Mueller. In 1999, Lehmann presented a kind of manifesto with his book Postdramatic Theater, which was both an inventory of new forms of theater and a clear-cut aesthetic theory. From then on, it developed an enormous influence on the debate and the self-image of young theater makers, who had said goodbye to drama and theater as mimetic depictions of reality and players in the service of their fictional roles.
Rimini Protokoll and She She Pop were founded while studying under Lehmann
As a professor at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen, which he co-founded, Lehmann influenced theater artists as diverse as the pop director Rene Pollesch or Hans-Werner Kroesinger, together with his dramaturge Regine Dura, a clever innovator of political documentary theatre. Two of the most important concept and performance groups of the past decades, Rimini Protokoll and She She Pop, were founded in Gießen while they were studying with Lehmann.
With his last major book, “Tragedy and Dramatic Theater”, the theater scholar continued the topic of his habilitation, “Theater and Myth”, with which he opened up a fairly radical view of ancient tragedy, strongly influenced by French poststructuralism.
The connection between his students and their teacher remained close. The night after Lehmann’s death became known, Daniel Wetzel from Rimini Protokoll sent a video recording of a lecture by this great teacher. On July 16, Hans-Thies Lehmann died in Athens at the age of 77 after a long and serious illness.