Chapter Three—
Theater Battles
With one exception, the men in the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden who in the summer of 1945 deliberated upon how to fill the leading positions of Berlin's surviving theaters had been active in the Berlin theater during the Third Reich. In addition to Ernst Legal and Paul Wegener, this circle also included Karl-Heinz Martin and Jürgen Fehling, both known directors before 1933, and Boleslav Barlog, a young film director who emerged from obscurity in the spring of 1945. The sole exception was Gustav von Wangenheim, head of the former communist theater company Truppe 1931, who returned from Russian exile to Berlin in June 1945. Missing were the two men who had made "great theater" (K. H. Ruppel) in opposition to the official artistic policies in the years 1933–45: Heinz Hilpert, head of the Deutsches Theater; and Gustaf Gründgens, director of the Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt. Hilpert had left before the war ended. Gründgens was in Berlin during the collapse, and immediately afterward resumed rehearsals of his production of Schiller's The Robbers, the last play performed in the Staatstheater before the theaters were closed in September 1944. He had been present at those first meetings from which the Kammer soon after emerged. The same day the Kammer was officially founded at Schlüterstrasse, the sixth of June, he was arrested by the Russians—apparently not by military authorities but by the NKVD[*] —and brought to an internment camp
[*] The Narodyni Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs), created in 1934, was the Soviet political police and counterintelligence organization. In 1943, it was divided into two commissariats, the NKVD and the NKGB.
near Berlin. Held there until March of the following year, he was absent for the decisive phase in the rebuilding of Berlin's theater life. The reasons for his arrest remain puzzling to this day. The conjecture usually offered, that the Russians had mistaken the title "General-Intendant" in Gründgens's passport or on the door of his office for a military rank, seems somewhat naive given the intelligence standards of the NKVD. Moreover, such a misunderstanding might have been quickly cleared up. There was enough opportunity to do so. For immediately after Gründgens's arrest, everyone of good standing and reputation in the Berlin theater or with any connection to the Russians, from Wegener to Wangenheim, sought his release. Furthermore, the treatment of his colleague Heinz Tietjen, general director of the Deutsche Staatsoper, showed how little the Russians made of such titles and positions of the Third Reich. Along with Klemens Herzberg, Tietjen had been appointed General Plenipotentiary for Berlin's Opera Theater by the Russian city commandant Bersarin in May 1945. His removal from this position shortly thereafter was an unpleasant surprise, but of no further consequence. Until his denazification, which went off without a hitch a little later, Tietjen was left alone.
Gründgens's absence was striking because his theater had been the only one taken seriously in the preceding years. It was considered an island in a sea of aesthetic and intellectual depravity, a "pier," as Wolfgang Harich wrote in 1946, "stretching along the arch of intellectual tradition toward a new shore in our time ... in the service of an eminent political mission, in a daily struggle to defend intellectual labor against barbarism."[1]
The Staatstheater was now a ruin. Rehearsals of The Robbers ended with Gründgens's arrest, and the members of the ensemble who had remained in Berlin found ready reception at the still-standing Deutsches Theater on Schumannstrasse. Here, less than a kilometer's flight distance from the destroyed city center, the whim of bomber approach paths had spared a handful of theaters: the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, which stood not far from the Deutsches Theater, and the Kammerspiele, located in the same building (the two old Max Reinhardt playhouses); the Admiralpalast on Friedrichstrasse (since the spring of 1945 the playhouse of the bombed-out Staatsoper ensemble); and the former Grosses Schauspielhaus (the "drip-stone cave"), where Max Reinhardt had also played and which would later open as the Friedrichstadtpalast.
In the summer of 1945, the Deutsches Theater became Berlin's most important theater, its rebirth trumpeted as the continuation of a great and untainted past in the very building from which the legendary Max Reinhardt had lifted the German stage to world acclaim. It was under this roof that Hilpert's and Gründgens's ensembles, the two islands of oppositional theater in the preceding twelve years, were now united.
The importance of Berlin's new "first stage" showed in the appointment of its director. While other theater positions were filled without further debate, the Deutsches Theater triggered a bitter competition. Jürgen Fehling made his entrance with the greatest and (in the eyes of many) the most pathological vigor. His claim was based on what he had achieved in the way of aesthetic-dramatic opposition during the Nazi period—and this was not insignificant. One need only recall his production of Richard III in 1937: the image of the great political criminal limping across the stage evoked in the mind of every spectator the figure of Goebbels. The enormous expanse of the entire stage, dwarfing the actors to antlike figures, offered an ingenious spatial metaphor for totalitarianism. "A distance, breadth, and dimension never before experienced on the stage. ... In this space, men struggle—and their action is small and puny against the expansive void," wrote Paul Fechter about the premiere, adding: "Small, lost, helpless creatures in the icy reach of this cold space which monstrously encompasses their fate like a trifle, like something hardly worth considering."[2] All of this transpired in a lighting that, as K. H. Ruppel wrote, "is not favorable," that "instead ... possesses a terrible brightness that cruelly unveils all that is concealed."[3] These were the images with which Fehling had made his impression on Berlin's theatergoing public during the Third Reich. Even a disposition more balanced than that of the manic-depressive Fehling might have had difficulty in resisting the temptation to demand a position in Berlin's postwar theater commensurate with such accomplishments. Yet the thought of giving the Intendanz of the most important theater to Fehling, a notorious bundle of nerves, made Wegener's hair—and that of all those responsible for the theater—stand on end. Left to themselves, they would have offered it to Gründgens, known as a deft diplomat and skilled politician, under whose Intendanz, after all, Fehling had been able to stage his production of Richard III . Fehling was offered a permanent position as tenured director at the Deutsches Theater under the administrative directorship of Ernst Legal. Negotiations ended with a tantrum from Fehling, who demanded all or nothing. He
departed Schlüterstrasse with the histrionic salvo "Once again the first German is driven into emigration,"[4] and subsequently opened his own short-lived Jürgen Fehling Theater in the district of Zehlendorf. The reason for his unsuccessful attempt at a career as Intendant was undoubtedly his well-known administrative incompetence and his anarchic temperament. This had once before tripped up his career, when Goebbels's office had offered him the directorship of the Volksbühne in the fall of 1934.[*] Herbert Ihering's explanation a few years later of Fehling's failed move into the Deutsches Theater was correct: "The power of his stagings—the recklessness of pressing people, time, and everything around him into the service of this one work, and excluding all else or persecuting it with a fierce hatred ... —[became] a weakness when it came to building up or holding together a whole theater."[5] But by the summer of 1945 there was more to it than that. Theater in a totalitarian society is not just theater; it assumes functions that in a democracy are left to political journalism. If a Goebbels can be criticized neither on the front page nor from bar stools, a politicized staging of Richard III assumes a critical function: the director takes up the critic's pen, and his stage becomes a loaded editorial. Those in the theater thereby develop a particular type of self-assurance, as was more recently the case in the dramatic and literary life of Eastern European state socialism. After the fall of the totalitarian system, as for the celebrated war hero in peacetime, the return to normality is not easy. This was the position in which Fehling found himself in 1945. He "was raving about because the enemy he had faced up till then, National Socialism, no longer existed, his aggressive imagination had no target and therefore sought out victims" (Ihering).[6]
After the Fehling debate, and after a short period in which the actor Paul Bildt served as provisional head, Wangenheim, who had returned from Moscow, became director of the Deutsches Theater. According to his own account, the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden had first granted
[*] Goebbels sought in Fehling, whose political stance he was aware of, a counterpart to Gründgens, Göring's show horse. The relative importance of aesthetic quality assigned by the Nazi regime vis-à-vis an artist's political stance is evident in the appointment of party member Graf Solms to the Volksbühne. When it became clear that Solms could not be paraded about, he was dismissed and Fehling sought out as the solution. "Get rid of Solms soon! Settle things with Fehling!" Goebbels noted in the margin of the report from his theater administrator. Due to a "still undetermined so-called incident with Fehling, no contract was concluded." Jutta Wardetzky, Theaterpolitik im faschistischen Deutschland (East Berlin, 19 8 3), 115–16.
him the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, which until then had been occupied by Rudolf Platte. "Unburdened by all representative duties, my job here was to build up an entirely new ensemble and create a progressive repertoire."[7] Wangenheim wanted to resume the experimental work of Truppe 1931 before his emigration. When the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm was confiscated by the Russians for their own purposes, Wangenheim—still according to his own account—applied for the Intendanz of the Deutsches Theater. It was unanimously granted to him by the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden. A year later Wolfgang Harich, one of the best-informed observers of Berlin's theater scene at the time, presented the matter differently. He claimed that Wangenheim "[had] his eye on the Deutsches Theater from the very first day of his return" and that "the way Wangenheim soared up to the directorship of the Deutsches Theater was nothing other than a base intrigue." Wangenheim supposedly appeared one day at Schülterstrasse with a letter from Winzer "according to which the Schiffbauerdamm Theater was closed on a special order [and Wangenheim] wanted him to become director of the Deutsches Theater. If the theater board had denied Wangenheim the Deutsches Theater at that time, no one in Russian headquarters would have thought of insisting on it."[8]
If the truth lay somewhere between these two versions, Wangenheim owed his post less to the enthusiasm the theater people in the Kammer had for his work than to the influence of his party friends and the Kammer's obedience with respect to the presumed wishes of the SMAD. However, the appointment of a party communist remains astonishing, contradicting as it did the KPD's policy at the time of filling representative positions with bourgeois dignitaries. Were the returning émigrés not aware of the significance the Deutsches Theater possessed as the first stage and new state theater of Berlin? Or did they consider Wangenheim suitable to head up Reinhardt's theater because he, the son of Eduard von Winterstein, the oldest Reinhardt actor still alive, had himself once belonged to Reinhardt's world as a student of the Reinhardt school and young aficionado at the Deutsches Theater? Perhaps the party figured that Wangenheim would now reclaim his personal "bourgeois heritage," abandoned when he left Reinhardt's theater and established his Truppe 1931. Perhaps Wangenheim's bourgeois youth was intentionally invoked to make him into a convincing representative of the new "national" and "nonpartisan" party line of the new Germany and the new German theater. Wangenheim's appointment was
as contradictory as the political stance on the theater developed in September 1944 at a Moscow conference of party intellectuals on the reconstruction of postwar theater. There were two competing lines. One argued a policy of reserve, restricting party members to key political positions and surrendering artistic positions to prominent bourgeois figures. Another voiced the demand from party intellectuals and artists to be taken more seriously by the party than in the past and thenceforth to be appointed to leading cultural positions. Maxim Vallentin, the most prominent representative of agitprop theater before 1933, formulated this line most clearly:
With our union and cadre policies, we underestimated or completely ignored the artistic significance of both our best comrades and progressive (and in some cases sympathetic) stage artists. We did not recognize that strengthening and increasing the artistic significance of our comrades should have been an important—if not the decisive—step for us in establishing strong authority. Instead of operating with artistic authority, we almost always ignored it and thereby left progressive figures prey to resignation and despair, or the demagogy of the enemy. We made them into so-called simple party soldiers when, viewed correctly, we should have made them and many sympathetic prominent figures into generals on the cultural front , which—in my opinion—must be one of our future tasks [emphasis in original].[9]
Wangenheim's appointment as head of the Deutsches Theater would show whether the conclusion drawn from the mistakes of the past proved the correct path. But who was Gustav von Wangenheim? What had the man who was now a general on the cultural front done as a simple party soldier?
In the Weimar period, the founder of Truppe 1931 belonged, together with Piscator, Brecht, and Maxim Vallentin, to the stars of leftist political theater. Truppe 1931 was composed of unemployed actors. It was not aimed at a proletarian public like Vallentin's agitprop theater; instead, it tried to flush out the illusions of independence, individuality, and honor of a petit bourgeois audience. Wangenheim wrote and produced plays, in which similarities to Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards are unmistakable. The parodic, high classical form—including citations from and allusions to Hamlet and Faust —were meant to jolt the spectator out of a false consciousness. The whole thing was bawdy and impudent, drawing less on the KPD platform than on Siegfried Kracauer's essay "Die Angestellten." In 1931–32, The Mousetrap was a great success in Berlin; even Alfred Kerr numbered among its bour-
geois admirers. Wangenheim's personal lifestyle was that of the dandy-communist type. In his spacious apartment in the west of Berlin, clad in a velvet dressing gown and sporting a monocle, he received astonished party comrades who knew nothing of this side of his life. He earned his money as a silent-film actor (e.g., in the role of the assistant broker in Murnau's Nosferatu ).
Wangenheim's relationship to modern experimental art, like that of so many of his generation and party comrades, had been ruptured. In the so-called Expressionism Debate during his Moscow exile he represented the position—a precarious one under the conditions at that time—of not rashly dismissing modern art and literature along with late bourgeois decadence, but instead of taking it seriously as a symptom of crisis. Decoded, this was an effort to preserve for socialist realism a variety of aesthetic forms and techniques. "Stramm [i.e., the poet August Stramm] is a dead end," wrote Wangenheim in an article in 1938, "but something can be going on even in a dead end: Real! Intense!"[10] The courage he had shown in artistic-political debates seems to have failed him in the reality of Stalin's terror. He was one of the very few, if not the only one, of his exile troupe Deutsches Theater—Linke Kolonne to survive. As a witness for the prosecution he took part, possibly as an informant, in Carola Neher's arrest.[11] In the spring of 1945, he was among the émigrés in Moscow who tried to return to Berlin as quickly as possible. An almost beseeching letter to Pieck suggests that Wangenheim took a far greater interest in his return and employment than the party leadership did. ("Should I once again unfortunately not be able to choose this often underestimated task [winning over bourgeois intellectuals and artists as party comrades], then I request the command of some other party work.")[12] This urgency was perhaps the reason why Gustav von Wangenheim arrived in Berlin in June 1945 with no kind of experimental plans akin to his earlier dramatic work. Abandoning the class struggle for the present, he now fully adopted the party line of attending to the classical inheritance, of Lukácsian realism, of rebuilding a new national German culture. As he explained in July 1945, his dramatic work in the future would no longer "advance as the avant-garde in the fight against decadence, dissolution, and reactionism" but instead serve as part of the "broad democratic front of the German revival."[13]
Deutsches Theater mounted ten productions under Wangenheim's leadership in the 1945–46 season—three classics (Lessing's Nathan the
Wise, Molière's School for Wives, and Hamlet ), three modern classics (by Chekov, Hauptmann, and Sternheim), and four contemporary pieces (by Julius Hay, Friedrich Wolf, Friedrich Denger, and Rachmanov). Four of these Wangenheim produced himself: Hamlet and three of the contemporary pieces. To heed the reception of Berlin's critics, it was theater of mediocre quality: no exceptional achievement, no great event, but acceptable under the conditions. Critics noted with approval Wangenheim's efforts to fill the decimated ensembles of the Deutsches Theater and the Staatstheater with suitable replacements. Most favorably disposed to Wangenheim were the three tone-setting critics of the older generation (Paul Rilla at the Berliner Zeitung, Paul Wiegler at the Nacht-Express, and Fritz Erpenbeck at Theater der Zeit ). The reviews today read as though their authors had internalized the kind of Kunstbetrachtung demanded of them over the previous twelve years. Two critics of the younger generation disagreed. Walther Karsch at the Tagesspiegel and Wolfgang Harich at the Kurier found Wangenheim's theater conventional, boring, and stuffy, a kind of betrayal of all that Wangenheim had once stood for. Karsch wrote: "With horror the spectator turns away—back to 1931, when The Mousetrap and the name Gustav von Wangenheim were a promise for us twenty-five-year-olds. This should have been made good on. And what has resulted? A 'court theater' in which stars are allowed to behave like unruly children, and dull mediocrity struts about."[14] Harich, who said of one Wangenheim production that "only shocking embarrassments jolt you out of the fatigue,"[15] asked whether the former revolutionary of the theater, "who 15 years ago, in protest against the pompous revue hubbub of the late Reinhardt, founded the political avant-garde Truppe 1931 ... has meanwhile grown so experienced and been so strongly influenced by Stanislavsky's tyranny in Moscow that he now knows nothing beyond a pious eclecticism. We hoped for something unheard of and new from Wangenheim and were disappointed again and again by a stuffy conventionality."[16] In private Harich expressed himself to Herbert Ihering even more scathingly. Ihering had formerly provided dramaturgic advice for Truppe 1931. After Wangenheim's appointment at the Deutsches Theater he had become the chief dramaturge there. Harich now reproached him for the same forfeiture and betrayal of earlier standards as he did Wangenheim:
It is unbelievable that a theater critic of your caliber remains the dramaturge at a theater where productions like Gerichtstag, a trivial Hamlet,
Beaumarchais, Wir heissen euch hoffen, and Sturmischer Lebensabend were possible.... If you really are the same honored and admired Herbert Ihering who was the antipode to Alfred Kerr before 1933 and author of Regie, then you should have imprinted your stylistic will at the Deutsches Theater or have pointedly refused all further collaboration. Or you should have prevented the Deutsches Theater from being handed over to Wangenheim in the summer of 1945.
Harich held Ihering responsible for the fact "that the Deutsches Theater was reduced to the bleakest and most boring stage in Berlin." There occurred "unheard-of nonsense" under a "bewildered and unfocused Intendant " leading it to "artistic ruin." All this was "grotesque, even ghostly."[17]
Harich publicly demanded Wangenheim's dismissal and his replacement with the one director in Berlin, indeed in all of Germany, whom Harich, Karsch, and other young intellectuals considered capable of creating great theater. "Without Jürgen Fehling?" headed the retrospective review that Harich published at the end of Wangenheim's season. Walther Karsch added with somewhat more discretion: "Will there soon be a theater in Berlin to accommodate Jürgen Fehling?"[18]
At the end of August 1946, Harich's goal was achieved. Wangenheim stepped down "for health reasons" and "in order to devote himself to other matters," as it was officially stated. In fact it was greatly against his will and—most rare for a party communist—amid voiced protest to the party leadership. "I am most outraged by the entire thing," he wrote to Wilhelm Pieck.[19] And after an inquiry made to the SMAD by Ulbricht in the name of the SED secretary's office as to whether "the change in the leadership of the Deutsches Theater can still be prevented"[20] found no reply, he wrote to the Russian city commandant Bokov:
Suddenly, at the start of a new season, I was—a novum in the history of the theater—requested to step down for health reasons. Without any valid reason. Without any discussion with the ensemble, which must be as surprised by me being dropped as I am. Without conferring with any superior authorities, the Magistrat or the central administration. Without any discussion in the SED central office of the enclosed report on my activities in 1945–46. The central office refused all such discussion because the matter was already presented as a fait accompli. I cannot timidly and shamefully abandon the office entrusted to me, abandon my own dignity and existence as an artist.... Herr General Lieutenant! If I am not to protest, you yourself must indeed be of the opinion that I am ill-suited for the position of Intendant
in a progressive sense. I thereby submit to you my protest against the self-annihilation demanded of me as a serious comrade and artist.[21]
Wangenhelm's dismissal is one of the puzzling episodes of Berlin's postwar cultural politics. It was strange enough that an event so unexpected for both Wangenheim and the public should have been announced, but not commented on, by all the newspapers. Even Wangenhelm's two chief critics remained silent. German journalists, as long as they offered no direct criticism of the victorious powers, were relatively free in their opinions. Would any commentary on Wangenheim's dismissal perhaps have been a commentary on the SMAD? Wangenheim, Pieck, and Ulbricht knew why they appealed in protest to the Russian representative to urge reconsideration. The decision against Wangenheim was made in the SMAD central office in Karlshorst. Under the agenda item "Change of the Intendatur [sic! ] of the Deutsches Theater" for its meeting of August 21, the SED's central office confirmed resignedly "that it was not debated beforehand but presented as already decided."[22] Given the evenhandedness, civility, and constant attempt to avoid unnecessary attention characteristic of Russian cultural politics, Wangenheim's treatment was unusual. What had he been guilty of? The explanation passed down through Wangenheim's family is too obliging to be believed: Wangenheim had supposedly stepped on the Russians' toes when he refused to engage the daughter of Anton Chekov's niece Olga Chekova as an actress at the Deutsches Theater, not knowing that her mother's lover was no less than Marshal Schukov, who felt personally insulted by the refusal.[23]
A more obvious explanation would be that Wangenheim was overtaken by a fate not infrequent in times of transitions of power: he was placed in a leadership position by his own party only to be thrown out of it as soon as he proved inadequate to the choice. Graf Solms, too, had found that after the Nazis seized power, a profession of political loyalty alone was insufficient. The same had been true of Franz Ulrich, named head of the Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt by Göring in 1933 only to be replaced soon afterward by a theater star unaffiliated with the party, Gustaf Gründgens.
But Wangenheim's fall cannot be explained as simply the correction of a politically motivated miscasting, either. For Wangenheim was not the type of failure merely pushed along under party protection. His work was comparable in quality to that of the heads of Berlin's other theaters—for example, Barlog, von Biel, de Kowa, Karl-Heinz Martin, Fritz
Wisten, and Ernst Legal. They were all, perhaps with the exception of Martin, average talents. No one expected of them spectacular achievements—but their stages also had no great names to lose. On the other hand, particular demands were made of the head of the Deutsches Theater. And Harich's and Karsch's reviews aside, Wangenheim satisfied them in the eyes of most Berlin critics. Even if there had been a general disappointment and discontent with his theatrical productions, his dismissal would have been a matter for the German theater world. It would have been slowly set up and prepared. Pro and contra would have been debated at length and many a commentary written without drawing the interest of the Russian authorities. It is difficult to imagine that Wangenheim was so abruptly ousted merely for making "bad theater,[24] as Arseni Gulyga, a cultural officer at the time in Berlin, recalled—even if the SMAD understood by bad theater something different than Berlin's theatergoers and critics in August 1946. There are reasons to assume that one particular production proved fatal for Wangenheim. It was the last of the 1945–46 season and his last ever.
Stürmischer Lebensabend (The Stormy Evening of Life ), by Russian playwright Leonid Rachmanov, was a schmaltzy revolution play fulfilling all the demands and criteria of high Stalinism. Its performance at the Deutsches Theater was requested of Wangenheim by SMAD officers Dymschitz and Fradkin. The Russians' concern with this production was manifest in the many articles preceding the event and a much-heralded interview with Rachmanov in the official SMAD newspaper, Tägliche Rundschau . The premiere at the end of May 1946 was, as the critic Werner Fiedler expressed it, a flop "bravely endured" by the audience.[25] Whereas the older critics engaged at Russian-licensed papers (Wiegler, Rilla) avoided the embarrassment with their usual pacifying Kunstbetrachtung, Harich and Karsch let their sarcasm flow freely. They attacked the sentimental character of the piece and, above all, Paul Wegener's portrayal of the lead role, a bourgeois-liberal professor led to communism by the October revolution. "He loads his role with mimic flourishes and flounces, tugging at them and getting caught up until a comic-strip character emerges, a grunting, tittering, shrieking, senile little man, as unconvincing as the honorary doctor from Cambridge he is supposed to be as his sudden resolve in the moment of political truth" (Harich).[26] The criticism in Neues Deutschland, the SED's central mouthpiece, took the same line: in his performance, Wegener had "reduced" the heroic professor "to a ridiculous figure who could convince no one ... he killed the whole play ... A truly great actor would have
played Poleshajev [the professor] and not a 75-year-old idiot."[27] The production scandalized the SED reviewer, and he called by name the person whose ultimate responsibility it was to have prevented it: "The director, Gustav von Wangenheim, should not have allowed any of this."
The Tägliche Rundschau, which as the mouthpiece of the SMAD had taken such an interest in the play and the production, seemed on the contrary richly satisfied with the performance. Whoever read the review must have thought it referred to another play, another production, another lead actor. Wegener had shown great dramatic talent, "adding to the series of his great characters a new, unforgettable one. Every word and gesture hit the mark, and one sensed behind the routine skill, which as always spoke in every nuance of the performance, an engaged heart."[28] It was praise worse than any sympathetic critique might have been. Stürmischer Lebensabend represented too much Russian prestige for the performance to be acknowledged as a complete flop and embarrassing blunder. The Stalinist code of honor did not permit such a loss of face. Instead form, facade, and appearance were maintained, regardless of the number of independent observers bearing witness to the contrary. What was declared a great event would be a great event, whatever the cost. The principle of the political show trial—the moral depravity of the accused claimed against all probability, all appearance, all evident reality, and carried out as a merciless ritual—was inverted: in the harmless case of Stürmischer Lebensabend , the fiasco was declared a shining success. What happened after the performance and after the critical reviews was of course another matter. With his firsthand knowledge of the psychology behind the show trial, Wangenheim might well have read the eulogy in the Tägliche Rundschau with horror and suspected what lay ahead.
If the failure of Stürmischer Lebensabend, the Russians' indignation, and Wangenheim's fall were the result of Wegener's pulp performance, then doesn't this entire sequence ultimately point back to him? Gustav von Wangenheim seems to have implied something of this sort. "The rehearsals with Wegener were agonizing," he wrote after the premiere. "I had to ignore the most upsetting political comments to avoid an all-out break. I found Wegener's acting style, the coughing and clearing of his throat and countless absurdities, extremely disturbing, but because I could not let it come to a break, I was unfortunately, I repeat, not in a position to do anything about it."[29] Wangenheim could not let it come to a break because the Russians wanted the stars Wegener,
Gründgens, and Gerda Müller for their state performance. Müller, according to the reviews, had laden her role with the same schmaltz as Wegener. Wangenheim thus found himself between two fronts. On one side were the Russians' demands, which began with the choice of the play forced upon him ("My only all-too-justified doubts about the chances of success for Stürmischer Lebensabend [were] inexplicably interpreted as antagonism in Karlshorst"), and on the other, the unwillingness of his own actors to take the play seriously. ("I was against Paul Wegener, because I already knew what kind of a naturalistic spell he would cast on this role, which for ideological reasons he approached with the utmost antipathy and antagonism. As a passionate supporter of the Soviet Union, I was now in a very difficult position.")[30]
Paul Wegener and Gerda Müller were not the only members of the ensemble at the Deutsches Theater who played against their director and his production, nor was Stürmischer Lebensabend the only incident of this kind for Wangenheim, but it was the one most fateful for him. His production of Hamlet and its interpretation of the hero as a man of action was equally sabotaged by the actors' antagonistic performance. Twenty-six years later this incident was recorded into the official history of the East German theater: "This made it impossible for Wangenheim to give his conception—to work out the conflictual social situation in Hamlet —full scenic realization."[31] But what prompted the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater to such behavior? Was it simply the esprit de corps of an ensemble that had played together for years? Wangenheim was not the only one to sense this. A young actress he had engaged, Angelica Hurwitz, had the impression of "a static, closed-off atmosphere. It was as though everything that was still to be worked through at rehearsal was already complete. All the rehearsals proceeded in an almost rarefied intellectual atmosphere. Aribert Wäscher and Paul Bildt seemed to communicate with half words."[32] Or was this the emergence (as it would later be termed) of "ideologically sharply diverging forces in the collective of the actors," who tried to rid themselves of the disliked outsider forced upon them by using their work to compromise him?
The real reason was Gustaf Gründgens. For the actors, he represented the opposite of Wangenheim. He was not an outsider, stranger, or intruder but the master, the father and protector in those years when the Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt had been an island of aesthetic autonomy. He had been the creator and ruler of the realm of
that "rarefied intellectual atmosphere" in which half-words and gestures outweighed heavy scripts and momentous historical interpretations. Grändgens, honored by his ensemble as the man who had created this protected aesthetic space and repeatedly defended it, possessed what Wangenheim did not: authority. This he retained despite his absence (in a Russian camp) and subsequent loss of power (he was demoted to simple membership of the Deutsches Theater's ensemble). Would it be misguided to conclude from this that Wangenheim ultimately failed in welding together the ensemble because of Gründgens and his past work? That would indeed be a great irony, for it was precisely in the field of organizing people—or, as Wangenheim termed it, of "apparatus"—that he had thought to have surpassed Gründgens. When Klaus Mann's roman á clef Mephisto was published in the 1930s, Wangenheim, who had worked with Gründgens in Hamburg, confirmed the depiction of the ambitious and opportunistic Högen-Gründgens: "Someone like that runs the apparatus like its lord and master—a stolen apparatus. We will strip it from his hands. This he knows and fears. But we will create art without an apparatus, and of this he knows nothing, understands nothing.... When art springs up from the nature of the people, the men of Gründgens's type will lose not only their positions but their talent as well."[33] The irony was that precisely the opposite occurred. Gründgens did indeed lose his post as Intendant and Wangenheirn assumed it. But it then proved that Wangenheim did not command the apparatus upon which the theater rested. An art "springing up from nature" did not emerge to assume the place of the apparatus; the apparatus he thought sentenced to extinction persevered. Wangenheim, the romantic communist of the theater who had been at his best in his independent theater group in the 1920s and 1930s, regarding it as the model of a future society, failed to understand why the apparatus would continue to thrive.
Wangenheim's successor and the head of the Deutsches Theater for the next sixteen years was Wolfgang Langhoff.[34] Several years Wangenheim's junior, he had gone through the same stations along his professional and political career. He came from the upper middle class, entered the KPD after World War I, led a theatrical double existence as youthful hero in the bourgeois theater and as agitprop group leader in the proletarian theater, meanwhile retaining, as had Wangenheim his monocle, certain unproletarian preferences for tennis and horseback riding, as well as an almost dandyish pleasure in socializing. These charac-
teristics had earned him the nickname "Prince of Wales" in his youth.[35] That, however, exhausts the similarities and common features between the two. If Wangenheim was more of a romantic dreamer type, Langhoff has always been seen as a realist and man of action. "He is representative of a new type of actor who is right in the center of action, face to face with all professional issues and politics.... Wolfgang Langhoff shows that the actor today is not a dreamer or actor in quotation marks.... Wolfgang Langhoff could be just as good a politician or engineer or mechanic as he is actor" (Herbert Ihering).[36] Langhoff had proved himself as a political organizer in exile in Switzerland. There he established and led the local National Committee for Free Germany. He held together with diplomatic skill the Swiss exile group of the German Stage Guild made up of communists and noncommunists and headed the KPD cell at the Zurich Schauspielhaus (a duty not to be taken all too seriously, as the company there consisted almost exclusively of salon comrades like Theo Otto, Wolfgang Heinz, Karl Paryla, and Erwin Parker).
Wolfgang Langhoff was the communist version of Gustaf Gründgens, a man whose artistic and organizational talents worked in harmony with one another, and who with the right mix of patience and strictness knew how to lead people, commit himself, and make good on those commitments. Shortly after his appointment, he solved the main problem of the Berlin theater once and for all. He hired Jürgen Fehling and, at Fehling's first escapade, promptly got rid of him, thereby demonstrating both his goodwill and his skill in the politics of the theater world.
Langhoff's leadership transformed the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater, influenced until then by Hilpert and Gründgens, into something new: the national theater of the emerging GDR. A few years later there would be no trace any longer of the "rarefied intellectual atmosphere" that had so impressed the young Angelica Hurwitz and left Gustav von Wangenheim short of breath. Or rather, another atmosphere soon reigned, equally rarefied and equally intellectual in its way, another elliptical style of communication through half-words and allusions. Like Gründgens in the Third Reich, Langhoff was to create his island of theater in the GDR.[37]