The Theatre Journal Auto / Archive: Erike Fischer-Lichte

As was the custom among the German educated middle classes, my first theatre experience was a performance of a so-called Christmas fairy tale in my hometown of Hamburg—a production, mounted especially for children and running from late November until the beginning of January, of one of the well-known fairy tales like Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, or Sleeping Beauty. This was a must for each and every municipal theatre. Thus it seems that there was nothing extraordinary about my first visit to a theatre performance. What was, indeed, quite extraordinary about it, however, was the fact that it took place in a city all in ruins, in one of those horribly severe postwar winters when people were starving and freezing—quite a few of them literally to death. And still, there were theatre, opera, ballet, and music hall performances. By the end of the war, most theatre buildings were destroyed and the companies dispersed. However, only shortly afterwards, in all the four sectors of occupied Germany—American, British, French, and Soviet—in the big cities, small towns, and even rural regions, everywhere actors, directors, and audiences would assemble in whatever places were available in order to let theatre happen. For, as the theatre critic Friedrich Luft stated in February 1946 in his Sunday radio column, "[t]heatre is necessary, most of all in times of misery." In order to initiate the youngest into the German tradition of valuing theatre as one of the most important cultural factors, even Christmas shows for children were staged again.

I do not remember much about that first experience at a theatre performance. However, the regularly recurring attendance at children's performances at Christmastime in the years to come nourished a certain addiction to theatre, so that I was desperately yearning to finally go to the "real" theatre—which, according to the strict rules that had to be observed in our Protestant family, was not allowed before the date of my confirmation.

In the second half of the 1950s Hamburg prided itself on having outstanding theatres. Gustaf Gründgens served as director of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Rolf Liebermann as director of the opera house (the first civic opera in Germany, founded in the seventeenth century and, after its total destruction in the war, newly erected), and George Balanchine as ballet director. I read in the newspapers about the marvels and wonders they were accomplishing on Hamburg's stages and was most eager to witness them myself. Before this could happen I sought consolation in devouring the plays performed at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus: Schiller's Wallenstein's Death (starring the director himself as Wallenstein), T. S. Eliot's The Confidential Clerk, Hans Henny Jahnn's Thomas Chatterton (both directed by Gustaf Gründgens), Thomas Wolfe's Mannerhouse (with Gründgens as General Ramsay), John Osborne's The Entertainer (presenting Gründgens as Archie Rice), Büchner's Danton's Death (directed by Gründgens), and Goethe's Faust I and II (directed by and starring Gründgens as Mephistopheles).

Figure 1.

Gustaf Gründgens as Mephistopheles in Faust II (Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg 1958 ff.). The penultimate scene, Faust's funeral. The stage is empty; Faust's grave is suggested by a rectangular spot of light. Mephistopheles dances around the grave, using the whole space, in order to catch Faust's soul, while the choirs of the heavenly hosts and the angels sing about his salvation. From Henning Rischbieter, ed., Gründgens, Schauspieler, Regisseur, Theaterleiter (Velber/Hannover: Erhard Friedrich Verlag, 1963), n.p.

When, finally, the day arrived that I was allowed to attend performances produced for adults, theatre became my passion. Although it was a one-hour train ride from the suburbs of Hamburg where I lived to the city's center with its theatres, and although I had to go there each morning anyway (because my school was located just around the corner from the Deutsches Schauspielhaus), I made the trip once more in the evening two or even three times a week in order to...