Verzauberte Moderne

„A magician isn’t a juggler, but an actor playing the part of a magician,“ said Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, founder of the first magic theater in Paris. In the transition to modernity, stage magic was a catalyst and battlefield of the conflict between the development of bourgeois culture and the rationalization process in the course of scientific progress on the one hand and the desire for myth, exoticism and spectacle on the other hand. Although it is highly theatrical, stage magic is a marginalized form of art. Sophie Oldenstein examines stage magic in the 19th and early 20th centuries from the perspective of theatre studies. Among other things, she analyzes the scenic practice and trick technique of stage magicians and contextualizes them with the societal, cultural, social und scientific discourses of the period of investigation.