Precarious Figurations focuses on the reception of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in
twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or
scholarly discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium the book explores why the
play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as
a staging ground for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In particular
the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has come to be both a device in and a
stumbling block for attempts to bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by
the Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of Merchant and in particular of
the ways of doing and reading Shylock in the context of painful German and German-Jewish
discourses of identity and remembrance is designed to raise fundamental questions - questions
concerning not only the staging of Jewishness the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the
difficulties of Holocaust remembrance but also the general potentials and limitations of
theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.
