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3 CLAUS PEYMANN orn in Bremen in 1937, Peymann enrolled in 1958 at Hamburg University, where he became involved both in theatre and political action, and these soon became closely related in Peymann’s activities. In 1959 he became one of the founders of a “Studio Theatre” at the University, organized in opposition to the established Hamburg Student Theatre, which Peymann and his associates found too conservative and too closely allied with the university literature programs. The first significant success of the group, and of Peymann, was his 1962 production of Brecht’s folk-play Der Tag des großen Gelehrten Wu, but much more important than the play’s own political concerns was the daring of staging Brecht. Although Brecht’s communist leanings caused some concern in West Germany during the 1950s, he remained in the repertoire, but when East Germany sealed itself off in 1961 behind the Wall, West German theatres responded with a boycott of Brecht’s work. Peymann’s choice was thus both surprising and shocking. Nevertheless the production was entered in an international student theatre festival in Erlangen and won the first prize. The Theater heute critic praised the production’s “astonishing pantomime and the effectiveness of the actors,” suggesting that perhaps “Brecht is not what people have made of him.”1 Peymann returned from Erlangen the unchallenged leader of the student theatre. He became the “artistic director” of the Studio Theatre and published his thoughts on student theatre in an article which called for an “engaged, socially critical theatre” that would present works with “intellectual content.”2 As examples he cited German expressionist drama and the works of Brecht and Hamburg author Hans Henny Jahnn, a kind of father figure to Peymann who was persecuted under the Nazis and later championed such causes as pacifism, the legitimizing of homosexuality, and German reunification. In fact during the 1963/64 season at the Studio, Peymann staged Jahnn’s allegorical Neuer Lübecker Totentanz and Brecht’s Antigone, in which Frank-Patrick Steckel, who would succeed Peymann as director of the Studio and later follow him in Bochum, appeared as the chorus leader. Antigone was restaged at the Berlin Schaubühne in September 1965 and again at the Frankfurt Theater am Turm in May 1966, gaining Peymann his first longterm professional engagement, as director of that theatre, where he remained until 1969. In a later interview, Peymann looked back on those Frankfurt years as “rather an extension of the student theatre,”3 since the Theater am Turm, like the Studio, was made up of youthful actors with very limited means. During his four-year tenure at the TAT, as Peymann rechristened it, he created fourteen productions, which established him as one of Germany’s leading 47 B young directors and the TAT as an important center of experimental work. Peymann ’s years at the TAT were years of great political turmoil in Germany as elsewhere. The protests in the United States over the Vietnam War and the student uprisings in France had their parallel in West Germany, where the protests were directed against an apparent weakening of commitment to liberal ideals in the major parties and a corresponding rise of much more conservative alternative groups. Students took the lead in developing an informal but widespread movement known as the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, and Peymann, with his strong ties to student organization, clearly sought to carry this spirit into the TAT, which he characterized as a “politically involved leftist theatre.”4 Peymann’s first new creation at the TAT, Martin Walser’s Der schwarze Schwan in October 1965, dealt directly with Germany’s fascist past in the story of a young man who seeks to expose his father’s actions as a concentration camp doctor. Previous stagings had presented the play as psychological melodrama, but Peymann offered a cold and analytic interpretation that the Frankfurter Rundschau characterized as “in the spirit of Brecht’s exemplary theatre.”5 Designer Eberhard Matthies created a simple and striking set, a square scaffold of steel pipes mounted with visible spotlights. It suggested a giant cage in front of a huge aerial photograph of Auschwitz. Brecht remained largely ignored during the 1960s by the older generation of West German directors, but among the youth, especially on the left, he attracted great interest. Even among this younger generation Peymann stood out, not only for his interest in Brecht’s own work, but also as applying Brechtian principles of staging even to quite non-Brechtian...

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