I’m now completely immersed in the work on my book on Shakespeare in Berlin in the last 100 years. In particular, I’m currently digging as deep as I can into the Weimar Republic years. But since that digging is turning up a lot of little things that either have nothing to do with Shakespeare, or might not wind up in the book, or are just too interesting not to share even though I don’t know what to say about them, or are too puzzling to me not to throw them out there to see if anyone has a response, I’ll start an irregular series of short quick posts about all that stuff. This is the first instalment.
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The Flu
The Schiller-Theater in Charlottenburg may be the most completely forgotten Berlin theatre institution, at least before it was taken over by the State Theatre in 1923. Technically, it wasn’t even in Berlin, since Charlottenburg was its own municipality until the theatre ceased to operate as an independent outfit. Contemporary theatre critics mostly ignored its efforts as well, treating it, perhaps justly, as a strangely provincial oddment close to the heart of the German theatrical avant-garde. For a theatre historian interested in performances of the “classics” in those years, though, the Schiller-Theater matters: it had an institutional commitment to staging great plays of the past and making them financially accessible to their lower middle-class clientele. A conservative institution with municipal backing (the city of Charlottenburg bankrolled the building of the theatre, which opened in 1907), its purpose was to put on “clean, smooth presentations” of the “beautiful and good” works of great playwrights — “everything that expresses noble thoughts in beautiful form” was suitable for its programming (see Georg Zivier, Schiller-Theater — Schlosspark-Theater Berlin [Berlin, 1963], 24-5). Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare was a Schiller-Theater staple. Between 1918 and 1921, it staged five of his plays, most of them directed by Max Pategg: Othello in the 1917/18 season, Hamlet and As You Like It in 1918/19, Much Ado About Nothing in 1919/20, and The Winter’s Tale in 1921/22. Although all those productions had healthy runs, some very successful ones (both As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale ran for over 40 performances), they were rarely reviewed, and even more rarely praised, but at least for those “provincial” petit bourgeois Charlottenburgers, the Schiller-Theater’s Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
In the Othello the company opened in March 1918, Desdemona was played by a “Miss Brohm” — a performance the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung found a little too “German-Gretchen-like” (too reminiscent of the character from Goethe’s Faust to do justice to Shakespeare’s Venetian, to spell out the implications of the phrase), but the production as a whole received more praise than usual. Reviewing the Schiller-Theater Hamlet a few months later, in October of the following season, the critic for the Social Democrats’ party newspaper Vorwärts remembers her, or rather “Miss Brohne” as a “young talent” whose Desdemona gave rise to “great expectations” for her future. But that promise was short-lived, extinguished already when Hamlet opened: Miss Brohm, or Brohne, who had been cast as Ophelia, was replaced a few days before opening with Hilde Coste, from the Royal Playhouse’s ensemble. Her future, the Vorwärts critic reports, had been cut short by the flu that killed her. It’s a real marginalium, hidden in a half-sentence towards the end of the review, and noted with a nod to the fact that she was one of many to meet that fate — a fact virtually absent from the headlines in contemporary newspapers, suppressed by a government keen to keep morale up even as military defeat was a near-certainty. Miss Brohm/Brohne’s death, between two Shakespearean tragedies, on the eve of the collapse of the German monarchy that for many of the Schiller-Theater’s patrons may have felt like a national tragedy, allows us to glimpse another, more private, tragedy of 1918, the devastating if publicly almost invisible impact of the worst influenza outbreak of modern times.
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The Armenian Othello
A curious production, not, as far as I know, discussed anywhere and barely reviewed: Othello at the Central-Theater in January 1923, during the single season when Erwin Piscator ran this somewhat marginal, out-of-the way venue (together with the playwright Hans José Rehfisch).
In the listings for the show, which ran for a mere 10 performances, its star is named — a practice common only for the most commercial productions of the time, or for those among the most famous actors who were no longer attached to specific ensembles. More curiously, the name is not a familiar one:
Who was “O. Abelian”? Advertising elsewhere (the above is from Vorwärts), in the Berliner Volks-Zeitung, the Central-Theater spells it out:
Ohannes Abelian was an “Armenian tragedian” — or rather, as the Volks-Zeitung‘s critic Fritz Zielesch would write the next day, a “famous Armenian,” a “man of merit” who has played a significant role familiarizing “the orient with European, and not least of all German, dramatic literature from Schiller to Hauptmann.” In Berlin, he joined an ensemble of German actors of less elevated status — Zielesch didn’t think most of them were up to snuff. Any production of Othello is in trouble if its Brabantio deserves special mention above all others, but here, only he (played by Gustav Roos) and Richard Horter’s Iago seemed at all noteworthy. Zielesch acknowledges that Carl Heine (a director of much experience and one of the driving forces behind establishing Ibsen in the German repertoire) had a difficult task, but nonetheless holds him responsible for the production’s shortcomings. Abelian’s performance, on the other hand, was a “captivating and engrossing” experience precisely because of its contrast with the German style:
“His speech is florid, passionate, emphasized with decorative gestures and lively facial expressions. What is missing is interior shaping of the role [‘innere Formung’]. His acting is all epidermis, but that does not make it superficial. He wants to be understood within the context of his world, a world of arabesque, of ornamental decor, of southern passion, which allows its colours to stream richly forth. We can approach a comprehension of this cultural and artistic constitution via our knowledge of Russian and even more Eastern Jewish stage art.”
Orientalizing as this account may be, it is not dismissive of Abelian’s art: Zielesch seems to value and appreciate its difference, and sees it as Heine’s, not Abelian’s, responsibility that the production failed to stage a real encounter of “orient and occident.” Not all reviewers were so kind. The critic for the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, acknowledged the actor’s “shapely, powerful physique” and “interesting head” (!) as well as his “flexible voice” but felt that Abelian lacked the artistic capabilities to make much of these natural “advantages”: he “belongs to an epoch of art we have long overcome. He is a typical representative of the pre-Meiningen era. He is governed by beautiful gestures. Every word comes with a pose, every utterance is emphasized with a corresponding, well-formed movement of the hands. His soul is in his hands, not his tone. He leaves us cold even when he seems to think he is heated.” No-one else rose to the occasion either — so poorly did the rest of the ensemble perform that the reviewer did not want to tarnish their otherwise well-earned reputations by naming them. They had done well in the past, but “they don’t know what to do with Shakespeare.” But as for Abelian, the Börsen-Zeitung is not content to dismiss his own skill, it casts aside his entire theatre culture into the bargain: his “many compatriots who filled the theatre were terribly enraptured. The art of Armenian acting can’t be much to write home about.”
What seemed fascinatingly exotic to one reviewer, then, struck another as merely fatally familiar, redolent of an old-fashioned, declamatory, gestural style of performance obsessed with decorum and beauty, that was not just one, but two generations out of date. Both perceptions are obviously culturally grounded: one enhances and admires the otherness of the foreign actor, the other insists on viewing that actor’s performance only through the culturally and historically specific lens of 1923 Berlin. Both, I presume, necessarily misread Abelian’s work.
The “Armenian Othello” — a fractured production yielding a fractured (small) set of responses. What is unclear from those reviews: was the production merely split along stylistic lines, or was the rapture linguistic, too? Zielesch says nothing about Abelian’s language. The Börsen-Zeitung reviewer mentions the “guttural Armenian language” — but is this a reference to Abelian’s accent, or did he perform his Othello in Armenian, in a production otherwise entirely in German? Alfred Klaar in the Vossische Zeitung provides the answer: Abelian “spoke Armenian,” “and the finer nuances of his verbal expressions were only accessible to his compatriots.” Despite this “fatal duolingualism,” a viewer well-versed in Shakespeare’s writing could still gain a sense of “this artist’s identity and the character he had in mind.” (And Klaar wasn’t too impressed with that character: too smooth, too gentle, too elegiac in the end: a “seductive hero,” but no Othello — a far less complex take on the role than Ira Aldrige’s, whose performance Klaar recalls as the first Othello “from another race,” “den ersten rassefremden Othello.” And the production is barely worth a mention, a mere frame for Abelian’s performance.)
But who was Ohannes Abelian? Transliteration is an enemy here: under that name, Google barely knows him. As “Hovhannes Abelian,” though, he even has a Wikipedia entry.
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Matinees
Afternoon performances are something of a rarity in German theatre now, and they weren’t all that common in the 1920s either. Or rather, as I’m beginning to learn, they weren’t common for productions in a company’s regular repertory. Quite frequently, they were offered as special events for specific cultural associations or clubs. But for performances of Shakespeare and other classics, there seems to have been another category: productions put on for extremely limited runs, usually just three performances or so, in the afternoon, in theatres otherwise focused on light opera or popular comedies and farces. I have found 14 examples of this kind of production between 1918 and 1933, but I am sure there were more. Sometimes they were advertised, sometimes they are just listed in the weekly overviews of forthcoming productions published in many newspapers. From what little I have been able to glean so far, it seems that these were staged specifically for institutions of learning — i.e., they were intended for high school students, and presumably coordinated in some way to relate to what was being taught in class. (There is a vestige of this is the planning processes of many municipal theatres in Germany — the sense that they ought to program at least a few plays likely to feature in the high school curriculum, the odd Schiller, the odd Goethe, the odd Frisch or Dürrenmatt.) The Theater am Nollendorfplatz — later the first home of the Piscatorbühne — was the main venue for these productions, staging nine of them in four years, from Much Ado to Othello, from Merchant of Venice (twice) to King Lear. Curiously, sometimes these shows were put on while the same play was on stage elsewhere in Berlin. It’s impossible to say much about these special matinees (I’m not aware of any evidence that would allow me to even give the cast list for one of them, let alone describe a performance), but they can’t have been staged with elaborate sets or costumes, or with much rehearsal time at all; that they could be offered in favour of a “real” production might suggest that they were understood as a more “pure” stage version of the texts — performances designed to give access to the drama rather than as theatrical works in their own right. But that’s no more than a hunch. I’d love to learn more about these shows — does anyone know anything about them?
6 Responses to 1920s Berlin Theatre: Research Marginalia 1
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I have just come across in an old family letter a mention of a visit to a Berlin theatre to see “As you like it”, on Wednesday, May 23rd, 1923. The writer (an Englishman) was very enthusiastic (“I have never seen Shakespeare properly treated before”). He does not say which theatre. Have you any information about such a performance?
Dear Sandra,
that is fascinating — I would love to see that letter if you’d at all be willing to share it.
The production in question is bound to have been the one directed by Victor Barnowsky at the Lessing-Theater, with rising super-star Elisabeth Bergner as Rosalind, which had opened a month earlier and was in the middle of its run in May.
I don’t mean to quibble, but the original blogpost gave the impression that the Schiller-Theater was founded in 1907, when in fact its first performance was in 1894. The fact that it MOVED to Charlottenburg in 1907 is a different matter. Its character had been set 13 years earlier. I’m not going to dispute for a moment that the West Berlin theater, which reopened in 1951, appealed to a middle-class audience. But as to the theater’s ethos in its early years, under its founder, I see no reason to disagree with what Edith Sellers wrote in the “Contemporary Review” in 1900, at p. 870:
“Dr. Loewenfeld … made his mark in the world as a writer, especially by his Life of Count Tolstoi (by his translation of the Count’s works too) between whom and himself there is not only warm friendship but close sympathy. The Doctor shares to the full the Count’s intense pity for the poor, and his eagerness to give them a helping hand, but, being a practical man with more than his fair share of common sense, he differs from him fundamentally. … For he is bent on brightening men’s lives in this world, whereas Count Tolstoi’s strongest wish is to fit them with wings for the next.
“A theatre, he [Loewenfeld] holds, is, or ought to be a place of recreation, a place where men and women are not only amused, but where they have their dormant faculties aroused, where their imagination is excited, their feelings are touched, where they are made to laugh and to cry — are humanised in fact. It is a school where they who go are raised above class barriers, are taught to understand the different phases of life, and to sympathize with their fellows — to rejoice with those who rejoice, sorrow with those who sorrow. …
“In no other theatre, indeed, in Berlin, is such an interesting audience to be found. All sorts and conditions of men are there: white-haired professors sit side by side with first-grade teachers; rough-looking artisans with smart young clerks; droschke-drivers with Government officials. Factory girls are there by the dozen, especially on Sunday afternoons.”
The most lasting effect of the Schiller Theater may have been in Russia. In 1898, a lead article appeared in the semi-official Petersburgski Vedomosti, (Petersburg Gazette), praising the Schiller Theater and Löwenfeld’s belief that all people, including the masses, had a “right to art.” Within a short time, Russia had set up its own system of “people’s theaters,” funded by profits from the vodka monopoly instituted in 1897 in an effort to combat Russia’s enormous drunkenness problem. (Twenty percent of the profits were set aside for public hostels, restaurants, and theaters that would not serve alcohol.) By 1900, there were 200 such theaters in operation across Russia. It may be relevant that Löwenfeld’s brother-in-law, Adolf Rothstein, was right-hand man to Sergei Witte, the Russian Finance Minister, and that Rothstein’s right-hand man, Prince Esper Esperovitch Ukhtomsky, a friend of both Tsar Nicholas II and Tolstoy, was the publisher of the Petersburgski Vedomosti.
I was not aware of the impact of the _Volksunterhaltung_ movement in Russia — that’s fascinating!
To the extent that my brief thumbnail sketch of a particular theatre in 1918 was not designed to illustrate the details of that theatre’s historical development, you’re right that I didn’t do justice to the institution of the Schillertheater Gesellschaft. But I don’t think Edith Seller’s article quite reflects the complexities of the situation in 1900, let alone in Berlin at the end of WW1 (and almost a decade after Löwenfeld’s death) — the moment I was writing about. For one thing, the Schillertheater Gesellschaft competed, from the very beginning, with the Freie Volksbühne; without diminishing the importance of its mission to open the art of theatre to a wider audience, it is fairly clear that in its intended reach and its socio-political program, Löwenfeld’s undertaking positioned itself, quite deliberately, to the liberal right of its Social Democratic rivals. (Heinz Selo, in _”Die Kunst den Volke”: Problematisches aus den Jugend- und Kampfjahren der berliner Volksbühne_ (Berlin, 1930), describes the “Verein für Volksunterhaltungen” (in which Löwenfeld was the driving force) as propelled by the “purpose of preventing the Social Democrats from monopolizing the theatre for their goals” (24); Selo quotes an article in the _Deutsche Bühnen-Genossenschaft_ from 1893 that portrays the Schillertheater-Gesellschaft explicitly as an alternative to the theatrical enterprises dominated by the “radical political parties” (i.e., the Freie Volksbühne). But Selo’s analysis makes clear that the primary clientele of the Schillertheater, even in the 1890s, was not proletarian, but petite bourgeois: he considers it an institution for “the third estate, for lower-ranked public servants, for junior clerks, but not for workers,” and notes that the associations whose support the enterprise relied on (since they guaranteed to buy a set number of tickets) all represented lower middle class constituencies (“der kaufmännische Hilfsverein, der deutsche Lehrer-Schfitstellerbund, der Verein für Volksunterhaltungen, der kaufmännische und gewerbliche Hilfsverein für weibliche Angestellte, der Verein der Bankbeamten, die Berliner Beamtenvereinigung, die Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur, der Berliner Lehrer-Verein, die Ortsvereine des Vereins der deutschen Kaufleute, der große Berliner Handwerkerverein” etc.) (25).)
Writing from a more centrist perspective in 1927, Siegfried Nestriepke (one of the key figures in the Volksbühnen-movement and decidedly on the conservative side in the battles between communist and social democratic forces within it that erupted in the 1920s) sees Löwenfeld’s enterprise as part of the effort to separate attempts to open theatre to wider audiences from any political program (he describes the Schillertheater-Gesellschaft’s goal as “offering theatrical productions without any programmatic focus to less well-off audiences, but with a more petite bourgeois make-up than the Volksbühne” — _Das Theater im Wandel der Zeiten_ (Berlin, 1927), 437).
Sellers may well have been right in her description of the Schillertheater Ost in 1900 — after all, the Freie Volksbühne and its much larger rival, the Neue Freie Volksbühne, didn’t have their own theatres, so that its membership, which received thousands and thousands of tickets at extremely low prices to performances all over Berlin, would not have been as visible as the undoubtedly socially diverse audiences Sellers observed in the Schillertheater. The two Volksbühne associations also diverged in their aesthetic and political programs, with the “Neue Freie Volksbühne” closer to Löwenfeld’s deliberately non-political attitude to programming (an attitude that led to a close alignment between them and Reinhardt’s various theatres, to which the Neue Freie Volksbühne subscribed in huge numbers). But there were some very significant differences between these enterprises: for one thing, both Volksbühne organizations were financed primarily through membership subscriptions; they did not have the wealthy donors the Schillertheater relied on, nor did they have the same kind of institutional support by bourgeois associations. Thanks to their close connections to the SPD, the Neue Freie Volksbühne grew exponentially in the late 1890s and early 1900s, recruiting its membership largely from the working class. And by 1914, the organization succeeded in building its own theatre, financed primarily by the membership, and located in the Scheunenviertel, on the edge of some of Berlin’s poorest neighbourhoods.
The Charlottenburg location of the Schiller-Theater was designed for a rather different audience, and unlike the Volksbühne, the programming was not shaped by conflicts and debates between theatre makers with radically different political and aesthetic perspectives. And in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary phase towards the end of WW1 and the first years of the republic, that left the Schillertheater as precisely the kind of theatre I tried to describe in a few sentences: an aesthetically conservative institution staging well-made but unchallenging productions for a lower-middle and middle-class audience with a relatively provincial or suburban outlook. This is well captured in the section on the “artistic standards” of the Schillertheater in Dieter Schütte’s excellent, and exhaustive, article “Ein Volkstheater für Charlottenburg: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schillertheaters in der Bismarckstraße,” _Berlin-Forschungen III_, ed. Wolfgang Ribbe (Berlin, 1988), 53-106, 100-104; perhaps the most cutting assessment Schütte quotes is Siegfried Jacobsohn’s, from 1911, who described the theatre’s patrons as “an aesthetically under-age audience … a naive audience who have no standards but an inexhaustible capacity for enthusiasm.” (A final note on social reach: the Volksbühne organizations subscribed to the various Schillertheater venues as well, and sometimes rented the spaces for their own productions; to the extent that the Charlottenburg Schillertheater had a proletarian audience, those audience members attended primarily thanks to their Volksbühne membership — see Schütte 105, quoting a Charlottenburg city councillor in 1908.)
Sellers’ line about the theatre as a “place of recreation” and avenue for “humanizing” audiences is interesting. It implicitly places Löwenfeld in a line of succession that stretches back to Lessing and (particularly) the Schiller of the “Stage Considered as a Moral Institution” speech. It’s also a description that closely aligns his socio-aesthetic vision with such moderate Volksbühne figures as Julius Bab. On the other hand, the Schiller connection also links him to Leopold Jessner, for whom that Schiller speech was a constant reference point. But for Jessner, unlike for Bab, the necessary consequence of doing Schiller’s work in the 1910s was a degree of aesthetic and political radicalism. I have no idea where Löwenfeld would have positioned himself in 1918, but for Jessner, the idea that art could be made entirely without a political program was no longer viable after the revolution.
Regrettably, much of what is written here about the Schiller Theater is incorrect, starting with the date of its founding, given here as 1907. In fact, it opened its doors in 1894 in the former Wallner Theater in Berlin, with a production of Schiller’s “Die Räuber.” It moved to Charlottenburg in 1907. The early history of the theater was largely erased in Nazi times, undoubtedly because the founder, the idealistic Raphael Löwenfeld (1854-1910), was a Jew, who within a three-year period published the first biography of Tolstoy in any language (1892), was instrumental in founding the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (1893), and founded the theater. Unfortunately, later writers perpetuated the sanitized Nazi history of the theater, rather than consulting original sources. This essay seriously mischaracterizes the theater’s purpose, which was to make great theater available to the general public, including the housemaid and the droschky driver, on the principle that people had a “right to art.” For that reason, tickets were made extremely cheap, as little as 25 pfennigs a performance for subscribers. An Englishwoman, Edith Sellers, wrote an excellent account of the theater, “The People’s Theater in Berlin,” in the Contemporary Review in 1900. It is well worth looking up. Nor was it state-sponsored. Löwenfeld believed that with state support went state control, and he was determined that the theater be self-supporting, in part to encourage the founding of similar “people’s theaters” elsewhere. It remained so until 1923, when the German inflation forced the theater’s management to yield it up to the city authorities. For more information, see my article, “Raphael Löwenfeld, Leo Tolstoy’s First Biographer,” in the 1998 issue of the Tolstoy Studies Journal. Full disclosure: Löwenfeld was my great-grandfather. And since the author of this blog has an interest in the playwright Ödön von Horváth, I’ll mention that his daughter Eva Ortmann was Juanita the Gorilla Girl in the premiere of Kasimir und Karoline in 1932, singing the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman while wearing a gorilla suit. Finally, any account of Shakespeare in Berlin in the last century would be incomplete without considering the performances of the Jewish Kulturbund.
I’m a bit perplexed by the charge of inaccuracy and the implicit charge of perpetuating a sanitized history. The Charlottenburg Schiller-Theater did open in 1907; the Schiller-Theater Gesellschaft under Löwenfeld was the driving force behind the building of the theatre, but the construction of the building was funded by the city of Charlottenburg; the Schiller-Theater Gesellschaft was the first leaseholder (they never owned the building). As far as I can see, the company originally proposed to build the theatre themselves in exchange for a partial loan from the city, but the city council eventually decided to build the theatre themselves and let it be run by the company. My focus isn’t on the Gesellschaft’ activities before 1907, but by the time they moved to Charlottenburg, an annual subscription was 22 Marks for 22 performances. Similarly, a move to Charlottenburg cannot have been conducive to maintaining an audience of housemaids and cab drivers — the old location in the East was closer to that clientele. Finally, by the 1910s, which is the period I was sketching, the Volksbühne (which used to include tickets to the old Schiller-Theater’s performances among its members’ subscription packages) had become the natural home for working-class audiences, with its own theatre (built with a similarly democratic interior), whereas the West Berlin Schiller-Theater had become a thoroughly bürgerliche outfit; look at any of the program leaflets from that period, and the tone of the essays as well as the kinds of companies that placed their advertisements there clearly have a petit bourgeois audience with aspirations to education and refinement in mind. Precisely the kind of audience a program focused on “the beautiful and the good” “expressive in its form of noble thought” (those are phrases from the Schiller-Theater’s own program; by 1918, the deliberate avoidance of any political commitment marked a stark contrast to the Volksbühne). I certainly did not mean to erase Löwenfeld from history: he’s clearly a key figure in the Wilhelmine history of Berlin theatre. But my purpose in this very short note wasn’t to give even a thumbnail sketch of the Schiller-Theater Gesellschaft as a whole.
As for the Kulturbund, I completely agree. Thankfully, the work of that association has now been described in rich detail by Rebecca Rovit, and the rather dismissive account of their productions (as a worthy testimony to the spirit of Jewish theatre makers under Nazi rule, but as aesthetically negligible) in the standard accounts of Shakespeare in Germany is ripe for revision.