Band 24, Heft 2

In the history of modern theatre, Otto Brahm is canonized mainly as the founder of the Freie Bühne (1889), the first Naturalist stage in Germany, which – as a private society – produced censored plays by Ibsen and Hauptmann and opened the way for the general acceptance of socially-oriented contemporary plays on the German stage. Brahm began as an influential theatre critic who, throughout the 1880s, fought against the popular theatre which was dominated by the star-system and by French-influenced light comedies. Instead, he advocated those new plays – especially by Ibsen – that presented contemporary society in positivist detail and with a social-activist critique. Brahm maintained his faith and focus on such plays when he became director of the Berlin Deutsches Theater (1894–1904) and, later, of the Lessing-Theater (1904–1912). Throughout, he produced a quality of theatre that turned Berlin into a famous theatre capital. Brahm ’s Jewish identity has rarely been studied, mainly because Brahm himself left so little witness to it, despite the growing political and racial anti-Semitism that existed during his life. This identity, which at the time was always significant, played a considerable role both in his personal life and in his extraordinary career. This article traces this role, as well as Brahm’s complex relationship to his Judaism, with the goal of re-inscribing Brahm ’s history into a Jewish context.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Interaktionen zwischen jiddischen Schauspielern und den Angehörigen der deutschen Armee während des Ersten Weltkriegs. Es wird gezeigt, dass diese Beziehungen als Katalysator für die Gründung der »Vilner Trupe« verstanden werden können. Diese zweifellos erfolgreichste jiddische Theatertruppe aller Zeiten gilt bis heute als die maßgebliche Inspiration für die globale jiddische »Kunsttheater«-Bewegung. Der Aufsatz zeigt, wie die zufälligen Begegnungen zwischen jüdischen Flüchtlingen und Deutschen, die in Wilna stationiert waren, zur aktiven Unterstützung der ersten Inszenierungen des Ensembles beigetragen haben. Zudem wird auf den Einfluss eingegangen, der die deutschen Unterstützer und Theaterbesucher auf das Repertoire und die Ästhetik dieser Schauspieltruppe ausgeübt haben.

Am 28. April 1928 begann die Gastspielreise des Moskauer jiddischen Theaters GOSET in Berlin mit »200.000«, einer jiddischen Bühnenadaption von Shalom Aleichems Dos Groyse Gevin, die von Berliner Kritikern hochgelobt wurde. 1929 kam Habima zum dritten Mal nach Berlin und war beim lokalen Publikum bereits renommiert. Habimas Repertoire bestand unter anderem aus »Der Schatz«, einer hebräischen Adaption von Shalom Aleichems Di Gold Greber. In Gegensatz zu den Reaktionen auf Habimas vorherige Aufführungen wurde dieses Stück mit Empörung aufgenommen. Dieser Artikel bespricht die polarisierte Rezeption dieser beiden Shalom Aleichem Theateraufführungen in Berlin und untersucht, wie die Spannung zwischen der jiddischen und der hebräischen Shalom Aleichems Aufführung den die deutsch-jüdische Identität betreffenden Diskurs animierte.

Until 1933, highly renowned theatre critics of Jewish descent were dominant in the feuilletons of Berlin’s leading regional papers. In 1919, Ernst Toller, also of Jewish descent and, a year earlier, a member of the short-lived revolutionary regime in Munich, established his fame as a playwright. While serving a five year prison sentence, and until 1927, he contributed five plays to the German expressionist and post-expressionist drama, with four out of five first-night performances at the prominent Berlin stages of Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner. The article addresses reviews of these performances by critics such as Emil Faktor, Siegfried Jacobsohn and Alfred Kerr, asking among other questions, whether and how these critics present a viewpoint that can be seen as »Jewish« in terms of how intellectuals belonging to the Jewish minority were viewed in the Weimar Republic.

Biblical death penalty becomes practically inapplicable through talmudic legislation, though it is supported by the authority of the Torah. Consequently, death penalty remains a potential means of punishment, at least theoretically so, constituting a motif in the dramatic texts of the German-Jewish Zionist, lawyer and writer Sammy Gronemann (1875–1952). Following his immigration to Tel Aviv in 1936, difficulties in the application of this topos and of »Talion« in general become apparent in his dramatic works, particularly with regard to Germany. In face of the emerging horrors of the Shoah, Gronemann struggled to preserve the humanist-talmudic moment of the suspension of death penalty. He did so despite Zionist attempts to return to the biblical origins of Judaism, with its implied denial of cultural achievement in the Diaspora.

The idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.

Regardless of the historical period or the political system, Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), who always considered art as an autonomous realm, was doubtlessly the most important German »theatre man«. An actor and director, Gründgens was appointed Director of the Prussian State Theater by Hermann Göring, and was clearly a beneficiary of the Third Reich. He, however, also used the advantages of his position in order to protect actors who were »racially suspect« or married to Jews. He maneuvered to keep them on in his theatre and to protect their relatives, and this despite the fact that he himself was at risk due to his homosexuality. Despite his human decency, and his uncommon courage in the service of others, until the end of his life Gründgens could not admit that he had contributed to the glamour of an inhuman regime within whose cultural machine his own theatre operated.

After a promising start on the German stage, Jewish actor Herbert Grünbaum left Germany overnight in 1939 and settled in Palestine. The article takes his emigration as the starting point for the examination of his role as director and actor in the nascent Cameri Theatre. Grünbaum’s experiences in Palestine eventually resulted in his surprising departure in 1953. Although not a communist, Grünbaum chose to join the Volksbühne in East Berlin, one of the leading theatres of the GDR. In the late 1950s, in the wake of growing tension between the powers controlling the divided city, Grünbaum left the Volksbühne to become a member of the celebrated Schiller-Theater in West Berlin. Taking Grünbaum’s turbulent career as a case study, this article raises broader questions concerning the experiences of German émigré actors in Israel (primarily at the Cameri Theatre), especially those who ultimately chose to leave Israel and the Hebrew theatre behind, and return to the German stage.