Publication details
Paradoxy válečné paraboly: Performativita Mahlerova Mlýna
| Title in English | The paradoxes of war’s parabola: the performativity of Mahler’s Mlýn |
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The chapter deals with Zdeněk Mahler’s drama Mlýn (The Mill, 1965). Mahler, publicly perceived today more as an author of popularizing non- fiction and historical journalism than as a playwright, first published this philosophical play with elements of the absurd in the Divadlo journal in 1962, under the title U zdi (At the Wall, 1962). The final version of the play was staged by Otomar Krejča in the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava on May 18th, 1965. The setting is the German occupation in a cluster of three sites somewhere in Bohemia: a small town, an adjacent military training area, and a nearby concentration camp. The paper shows how the historical facts of World War II serve here as the background for a timeless, multivalent dramatic parable. Among the work’s tools of performativity we can rank not only its intermedial staging (it made use of film projections) but also the way that it presents as its main character a Nazi agent provocateur whose identity is deliberately falsely constructed. |