Title: The Writing and Interpretation of the Chinese Revolution in German Political Theater: Tai Yang erwacht as an Example

Abstract: At the beginning of the 1930s, the struggle between the left and right forces in Germany entered a heated stage. Against this background, Piscator, the originator of the German “political theater”, brought the play Tai Yang erwacht, which depicted the revolutionary movement of the workers in Shanghai during the Northern Expedition War in China, onto the German stage, and the tenacious and unyielding spirit of the Chinese working class became a weapon for the German Communist Party’s political propaganda. From the conception of the play to the performance, the issue of cross-cultural representation of the “Other” is subtly embedded throughout. Although the playwrights may have had a latent colonial mentality when they wrote the play, the German left-wing dramatists also sought to free themselves from the shackles of the Chinese cultural imagination through some ingenious details on stage, consciously seeking a way to break out of Western-centrism.

Keywords: political theater, Tai Yang erwacht, Erwin Piscator, cross-cultural

Authors: Jiayuan Lu, Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, Jiangsu University of Technology, Changzhou, Jiangsu, China; Bo Wang, Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, Jiangsu University of Technology, Changzhou, Jiangsu, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.01.008