Sunday, 12 January 1919

And suddenly, there are newspapers again: between Saturday and Sunday, most — all? — of the occupied buildings were stormed, dozens of protesters killed in process, hundreds arrested, and on Monday, the papers all tell long, detailed stories of their occupation. Vorwärts, the Social Democratic party paper, whose building was the first to fall, appeared again on Sunday, with a four-page edition entirely devoted to the unrest, calling for mass demonstrations in support of the government on its title page.

In the theatres, though, it’s business as usual. Here’s the daily listings from Freiheit, including two announcements of the programming for the week ahead (and the Staatstheater is missing again, but we know what they performed on January 12 from yesterday’s Börsen-Zeitung):

I say “business as usual” — but after my musings yesterday, I wonder if that doesn’t mean that the theatres, at least some of them, continued their mildly politicized programming during the pivotal weekend of the turmoil. The Volksbühne offered Wilhelm Tell again, and the Palast-Theater, rather than going back to The Mikado, as they had done for the previous week, ran a second night of The Shadow-Dwellers. Other than those, though, there is little going on in the theatres that seems out of the ordinary at all. One thing to note: Sunday matinees, almost everywhere! The Volksbühne Association, the organization that owned the theatre that still survives, in much modified form, today, but also organized a rich array of other theatrical and cultural events for its thousands of members, was one of the main drivers of this programming, and bought large blocks of tickets for these matinees, sometimes entire houses. As we saw before, it’s a mix of classics and fairy-tale shows, though on Sundays, the mix also seems to include popular shows from the evening repertory (such as the operetta Schwarzwaldmädel at the Komische Oper, which ran twice on 12 January — an arrangement familiar from modern Anglophone theatre, but quite unusual in Germany). Reinhardt’s three theatres all offered well-known productions from his regular repertory in the afternoon, though it’s not certain that these would all have featured the original casts: Hamlet at the Deutsche Theater, in a version directed by Reinhardt himself that had been in rep since 1913; Spring Awakening at the Kammerspiele, in Reinhardt’s 1906 staging that eventually racked up an astonishing 387 performances, far more than any other Reinhardt production; and at the Kleine Schauspielhaus, Pension Schöller, a farce by Carl Laufs and Wilhelm Jacoby that remains in the German comic repertory, and has emerged as a minor classic in the hands of leading directors such as Frank Castorf and Andreas Kriegenburg in recent decades. Like the week-day matinees for students, these Sunday afternoon shows were clearly not reserved for light entertainment: just consider that even a venue as sharply focussed on commercial froth as the Lustspielhaus chose to offer Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (or Nora, its more common German title).

Anything else? Not really, except to reiterate what I’d noted in an earlier post: just how much Wedekind there was on stage in those years. The Theater in der Königgrätzer Strasse staged virtually nothing but Wedekind, and between the two versions of Spring Awakening Reinhardt directed, that play saw almost 450 performances — a count that dwarfed everything else in his repertory, including the famous stagings of Midsummer Night’s Dream and the notoriously endless run of Shaw’s Saint Joan.