The central figure here was Hermann Göring, titular head of all the Prussian state theaters. He once declared that when he heard the word “culture” he got out his gun, but this was just bravado; in reality, he considered himself a connoisseur of the arts. He loved the theater and was himself quite histrionic, a center-stage performer with the girth of Falstaff and the character of Iago. Sometimes he laid aside his beribboned uniforms to dress up in a Robin Hood outfit with leather jerkin and thigh-length boots, or in a Roman toga with jewel-studded sandals. His passion for the theater was also reflected in his choice of a second wife, the actress Emmy Son-nemann, whom he married in 1935 in an elaborate ceremony at the Berlin Cathedral. As chief of the Berlin stage, Göring was no purist: he was prepared to cultivate talented non-Nazi actors and directors as long as they did not try to rewrite the script they had been handed. “It is easier to turn a great artist into a decent National Socialist than to make a great artist out of a humble Party member,” he observed.
Göring’s chief rival for control over Berlin’s theaters was Goebbels, who as head of the Reich Chamber of Culture and minister of propaganda and enlightenment had authority over all the Reich-administered theaters, which in Berlin included the Volksbühne, the Theater am Nollendorfplatz, and the Deutsche Oper (Charlot-tenburg). It irritated Goebbels that Göring held sway over the Prussian state theaters, for they were far more prestigious than his lot. He tried repeatedly to wrest Göring’s “treasure” from him, but to no avail. The Goebbels-Göring feud was typical of the Third Reich’s neofeudal structure, its endless battles between rival fief-doms with overlapping borders.
Göring’s prize theater-man was Gustav Gründgens, who became director of the Schauspielhaus in 1934. He had made his reputation in the 1920s in Hamburg, where he had dazzled audiences with his versatility as an actor. In those days he had embraced communism, but only as another role, one he could conveniently drop when he moved to Berlin in the early 1930s to star at the Deutsches Theater. According to Klaus Mann, who had known him in Hamburg (and whose sister, Erika, was briefly married to him), Grlindgens won over Göring with a virtuoso performance of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s
With commanding figures like Gründgens at the Schauspielhaus, Heinrich George at the Schiller-Theater, and Karlheinz Martin, another former revolutionary, at the Volksblihne, Berlin held on to its status as the capital of German drama. Its various theaters continued to mount well-executed productions of the German classics, especially those with an exploitable nationalist message, such as Heinrich Kleist’s
There were no longer any independent theaters in Berlin, unless one counted the small houses operated by the Cultural League of German Jews that were closed to Aryans. Berlin’s radical theater movement was decimated by the exodus of its most important practitioners. Erwin Piscator, as we have seen, had left even before the Nazis came to power. Brecht fled on the morning after the Reichstag fire. It is possible that he might have stayed on without being arrested, for the Nazis, especially Goebbels, wanted to retain some of Germany’s most famous artists and intellectuals as proof of Berlin’s continuing cultural importance. Yet had Brecht stayed on in Berlin he certainly would have been limited in what he (and his unacknowledged female coauthors) could produce, and he thought he could do better in exile, which he did not expect to last long. “Don’t go too far away,” he advised his friend Arnold Zweig. “In five years we will be back.” How could he have known that he would return to Berlin only after a fifteen-year exile in Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Los Angeles?
