From Stage to Screen: The Impact of the German Theater on Max Ophüls

HELMUT G. ASPER From Stage to Screen: The Impact of the German Theater on Max Ophüls In his early radio lecture, "From Prompt Box via the Microphone to the Screen" (1932),] Max Ophüls observed that he had taken the same path as an artist as had dramatic art and audiences in the twentieth century: from the classic theater towards the new media ofradio and film. Theater, radio and film were, in Ophüls' opinion, only three different paths leading to the same goal: "to show . . . the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," to cite Hamlet's advice to actors. These were Ophüls' Ten Commandments of dramatic art. Thirteen years later, Ophüls wrote in his memoirs that he had not been interested in silent film because he saw this industry as the enemy of the theater. He changed his mind only after having seen one of the first German talkies: "From now on I saw film as the continuation of the theater."2 And again several years later, in the mid-fifties, Ophüls wrote for a German theater magazine: "I come from the theater, from the German provincial theater, and awe and devotion to literature lie deep in my bones. Liebelei by Schnitzler as a German picture, Werther as French, Letter from an Unknown Woman by Zweig as American, La Ronde and Le Phisir by Maupassant as French pictures: they all were a kind of international service for poets and literature" (Ophüls, "Dichter" 32-33). These three statements from three different periods demonstrate how strongly Ophüls felt that theater and film belonged together. All throughout his professional life he remained devoted to the theater. Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 1 84 Helmut G. Asper The stage provided Ophüls with the first artistic impressions of his youth; he wanted to become an actor and learned his craft in the theater . Ophüls grew up in the theater of the Weimar Republic and worked as actor, director and author in numerous German theaters for twelve years (1920-1932), excepting the few months he spent at the Burgtheater in Vienna.3 These years in the theater were Ophüls' formative years, in every sense. The German theater in the Weimar Republic was a politically and aesthetically radical theater (Rühle). Although the political revolution that took place after the fall ofthe German Reich in 1918 remained incomplete , the concomitant theatrical revolution was profound. Stage and drama became a forum where all important political and social problems were discussed from ideological viewpoints ranging from the far left to the right wing. Because radio (beginning in 1923) and film were both strictly censored under the Weimar Republic (Lerg; Loiperdinger 479-98), the relatively uncensored theater was the most important artistic medium for political debate and often caused turmoil even at the parliamentary level in Berlin. During the course of the political revolution, the theater was also aesthetically renewed. In the early twenties the stage was taken over by Expressionism and Dadaism. The classical form of drama was shattered by young playwrights and directors who experimented with all kinds of new forms. Piscator and Brecht invented the epic theater, while Pirandello 's anti-illusionistic dramas achieved fame and were frequently staged during the twenties in Germany. The music hall revue became a model for political theater, and directors used all kinds of modern techniques in their mises-en-scène: the theatrical space was artificially enlarged by the use of slide projections, films, trapdoors, flying machines, conveyor belts and, of course, electric lights. And this revolution took place not only in the theaters of the capital, Berlin, but in all German cities—even in small provincial towns, because it was and is one of the most characteristic features of German culture that nearly every city runs a permanent and subsidized theater. When Ophüls started his career in 1920, he was confronted and highly influenced by these revolutionary trends and he played his part in this revolution. As actor he played in many revolutionary stage productions and as director he...