The particular relevance of family in human life and experience, which is addressed in family novels, is also evident in sociological studies. In what way can these views complement each other? The text is meant as a contribution to discuss this question, starting by presenting some statistical data on the contemporary diversity of individual and collective family behaviors. They are summarized in five theses focusing on an elaborated, open understanding of human generativity, i.e. the individual and the institutional shaping of generational relationships. These generalizations allow to build a bridge to studies on the family novel. I postulate that the commonalities of family sociology and family novel can be seen in the critical dealing with notions of normality, the tense shaping of social relationships, and – consequentially – the dynamic search for personal and collective identities. These processes go hand in hand with experiences of ambivalence and practices to cope with them.

As this introduction and the following contributions will show, family in its many forms continues to be an essential element of social life as well as of literary plots. With regard to Swiss literature, the family in its diversity intersects with a multi-lingual corpus, opening up a new view of the relationship between social precon-ditions and literary reflection.

This article discusses the theatrical form named in German Trauerspiel (the baroque drama or mourning play), focusing on the constitutive elements of its concept – both play and mourning. Although it has often been compared or reduced to ‘tragedy,’ in a sort of excessive anticipation of Romantic theatrical forms, Trauerspiel is more likely to express the traumas of secularization in the early modern age, as both noble and humble subjects face religious and political turmoil. Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s renowned thesis in the book „Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels“ (1925), the article investigates some crucial actual elements of baroque drama-writing such as sovereignty, guilt, empathy, and the search for further intersections with the theories of playwriting proposed in 1938 by Johan Huizinga and discussed a few years later by French critic and thinker Georges Bataille.

Walter Benjamin’s formulation about epic theater is well-known: Brecht succeeds in turning the theater from a “Bannraum” sort of spell room, into a “conveniently located exhibition space.” The epic playwright draws on “the great old opportunity of the theater in a new way – on the exposure of what is present.” Whether consciously quoting Benjamin or not, the words “exhibition” and “exposure” are often used by theater makers and scholars to reinforce the seriousness either of the act of showing or of the shown object. If something is being exhibited and not simply represented, the stress lies on the attempt to have an effect: to have consequences beyond the aesthetical as-if-frame. “Exhibition” and “exposure” seem first to recur with a precise and alternative sense in Benjamin, in Brecht and in the Russian avantgarde regisseur and author S. Tretiakov, who became a friend of Brecht in the 1920s. What they understand by “exhibition” seems to be something very specific, not a mere metaphor, rather an operational term. Benjamin uses it in various texts and different formulas (as, for example, the famous and enigmatic „Ausstellungswert“, or “exposition-value”, combined with “cult-value”, in a kind of historical dialectic of the work of art). But the concept of aura and its agony generally steal the show, while the concepts of „Ausstellen“ and „Ausstellungswert“ are often misunderstood according to our current idea of “exposition” from the context of museums, galleries and exhibitions, and according to our experience of “absolute visibility” as a paradigm of modern life (Agamben 2005). This easy to misunderstand, difficult to grasp “exposition-value” seems to name a different experience and an innovative chance that resides in modern reproducibility. Its difference could be not only relevant for theater and its history as an art form, but also for theater intended as a dimension and opportunity of social practice.

Being a spectator in the theater has not always meant watching a performance while sitting quietly in the dark. There was a time when theaters were fully lit and very noisy. A whole range of legislative, administrative, architectural, and aesthetic reforms as well as state ordinances were needed to tame this quarrelsome and undisciplined mass and to transform it into a contemplative and empathic audience that became a function of the imagination. There is a close connection between the development of a theater that had become an agent of government and the emergence of increasingly effective mechanisms of theatrical illusion. Governmentality generates a new aesthetic that aims to steer the audience in certain directions, to determine and to control it. It goes without saying that theater, especially modern theater, has had a decisive effect in this direction. Theater was and is both an agent of governmentality and its critique. Now, this critique has manifested itself and continues to manifest itself in projects aimed at emancipating the public from any kind of governmentality via the stage itself. Yet the stage remains an agent of governmentality even as it seeks to evade this function. This is a paradox that is perhaps constitutive and necessary to theater. The question now is whether this paradox can be resolved and whether an autonomous emancipation of the audience—one that is not governed by the stage—can be imagined, and, if so, in what forms. Put otherwise, it is a question of whether the spectator “without someone else’s guidance” can alienate himself from this position and become a self-determined subject.