Richard Beer‐Hofmann's Die Historie von König David : Jewish Biblical Drama and the Limits of Epic Theater

In 1898 the Austrian‐Jewish poet Richard Beer‐Hofmann began to sketch out a plan for a tetralogy of biblical dramas entitled Die Historie von König David . This project would occupy him over the course of the next forty‐five years, until he finally abandoned it in exile in New York, shortly before his death. Each of the dramatic cycle's three completed sections, Jaákobs Traum, Der junge David , and Vorspiel auf dem Theater zu König David , embodies a radically different theatrical form, ranging from festival drama to closet drama to a fragmentary dialogue between a narrator and the audience. In this article, I trace the development of Die Historie von König David as the poet engaged with multiple visions of “epic” drama that converged in Austrian theater in the early decades of the twentieth century: the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk , symbolist drama, and the movement towards anti‐theatricality in the modern theater.