From the Archives

Habima’s Displacements: Reframing Theatre Historiography and Archival Studies

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejtp.7.1.42839

Keywords:

theatre history, archival description, authoritarian regimes, memory, resistance

Abstract

The section convenor of From the Archives, José Pedro Sousa, introduces the contribution by Olga Levitan. Levitan’s article ‘An Archival Novelty: Theatre Habima’s Telegram to Joseph Goebbels’ offers a compelling case study of Habima’s attempt to perform in Nazi Germany. Tracing the company’s transnational journey from post-revolutionary Moscow to interwar Paris and Berlin, Levitan reconstructs a complex narrative of exile, cultural diplomacy, and artistic survival. At the heart of this story lies an unsettling document: a 1937 telegram sent by Habima to Joseph Goebbels, requesting permission to perform in Berlin.

Author Biography

José Pedro Sousa, Centre for Theatre Studies, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon

José Pedro Sousa holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Lisbon and an MSc in Digital Humanities from University College London. His research explores the early modern history of Portuguese and Iberian theatre, digital humanities, and textual scholarship. He is the Principal Investigator of the FCT-funded project PREC.PT – Performance and Theatre during the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (FCT 2023.10644.25ABR), editor of the “From the Archives” section of the European Journal of Theatre and Performance, and convenor of the working group Digital Humanities in Theatre Research at the International Federation for Theatre Research. 

Published

2025-09-02

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2025): Exile and (Neo)Nationalism

Section

From the Archives

Copyright (c) 2025 José Pedro Sousa

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.