Kurt Hirschfeld

The writing of theatre history usually scaffolds around the work of key playwrights, directors, actors, or companies; rarely do theatre historians shine light on the work of a dramaturg. Kurt Hirschfeld's story may be all the more remarkable because his accomplishments took place, as so much dramaturgical work does, out of the limelight. Yet both his life and his work were distinguished by considerable intellectual courage and moments of behind-the-scenes heroism. Born in 1902 in Lehrte, near Hanover, into a Jewish family, Hirschfeld studied philosophy and philology in Frankfurt and Göttingen, and then spent the first few years of his career working as a freelance editor, radio producer, and theatre journalist, apprenticing in the late 1920s under the influential Berlin critic Herbert Ihering at the left-leaning Berliner Börsen-Courier [Berlin Stock Exchange Courier].Footnote ⁵ In 1931, the dynamic leftist director Gustav Hartung—who had made a name for himself as a leading interpreter of expressionist plays—took over as artistic director of the Darmstadt State Theatre and brought Hirschfeld on board as the theatre's dramaturg and his own right-hand man. For the next two years, Hirschfeld helped to craft the theatre's repertoire, served as the theatre's literary manager and production dramaturg, occasionally directed, and also transformed the Blätter des Hessischen Landestheaters [Journal of the Hessian State Theatre] into one of the country's leading theatre newspapers.

In March 1933, the Nazi Party took control of the German government and began its purge of communists, anti-Fascists, and Jews from the theatre; on 13 March, in one of his first official acts as the newly elected governor of Hessen, the rabidly anti-Semitic Ferdinand Werner dismissed Hartung from his position as artistic director of the theatre. Hartung fled that same day to Basel, Switzerland; Hirschfeld, who had been warned that his name also stood on a blacklist, had days earlier moved out of his apartment and into a hotel, and he now followed Hartung's lead and had some friends spirit him out of Darmstadt.Footnote ⁶ Shortly after Hartung's arrival in Basel, the owner of the Zürich Schauspielhaus, Ferdinand Rieser, called to offer him work directing in Zürich; Hartung insisted that Rieser—who had little interest in having a dramaturg on staff—hire Hirschfeld as well. It took several weeks for Rieser to locate Hirschfeld, who had gone into hiding in Berlin. Hirschfeld later would tell the following story of receiving Rieser's call at the apartment of the scenic designer Wilhelm Reinking, with whom he was living in secret:

Hirschfeld left immediately for Zürich. He couldn't have known it at the time, but the city would become his adopted home for the rest of his life.

Hirschfeld's engagement at the Schauspielhaus would prove to have a decisive and lasting impact. When Rieser—a Jewish businessman who had made a fortune in his family's wine business—initially took over ownership and management of the theatre in 1926, he ran it primarily as a commercial enterprise, with a focus on producing entertaining plays that would fill the house and turn a profit. He had neither the interest, expertise, nor, importantly, the talent among his artists to expand the theatre's offerings beyond what Hirschfeld labeled “popular entertainment of hit-or-miss quality and indiscriminate origin.”Footnote ⁸ Hirschfeld's arrival in 1933 helped to shape and influence the development of the Schauspielhaus in two important ways. The first was on the level of personnel and talent: Hirschfeld immediately went to work identifying exiled or threatened artists who could turn the Schauspielhaus into a first-class theatre.Footnote ⁹ In his history Das Zürcher Schauspielhaus, Werner Mittenzwei relates that as theatre artists began to flee Hitler's Germany in 1933, Rieser seized on the opportunity to engage exiled actors, directors, and designers at bargain basement wages, and he relied heavily on Hirschfeld's expertise and connections as he went about recruiting talent.Footnote ¹⁰ Mittenzwei writes, “It was Hirschfeld who very deliberately pointed out to Rieser certain actors who had either already left Germany or had a mind to do so.”Footnote ¹¹ The people Hirschfeld brought to Zürich included some of the best actors, designers, and directors of the German-speaking world, among them director Leopold Lindtberg, designer Teo Otto, and actors Therese Giehse, Ernst Ginsberg, Kurt Horwitz, Erwin Kalser, Karl Paryla, Leonard Steckel, and Wolfgang Langhoff.Footnote ¹² For many of these artists, acquaintanceship with Hirschfeld would prove to be life saving: for example, Ginsberg, a Berlin actor who had worked with Hirschfeld in Darmstadt, later wrote, “I would have Kurt Hirschfeld to thank for my rescue to Zürich”;Footnote ¹³ and actor Wolfgang Langhoff—an outspoken communist who had been arrested and tortured by the Nazis—managed to make it across the Swiss–German border just hours before it was sealed on the “Night of the Long Knives” thanks to Hirschfeld's success in arranging for a pair of friends to smuggle him into Switzerland.Footnote ¹⁴

This “emigrant ensemble” quickly began to transform the Schauspielhaus from a commercial enterprise to a theatre of major cultural importance, as they brought not only the requisite skill and artistry to successfully produce a more expanded and challenging repertoire, but also a commitment to using theatre for social and political purposes. They worked in the belief, as Hirschfeld put it, that they “could do meaningful work, that … they could shine light on political, ethical, and religious issues. They could help save and protect an endangered way of life.”Footnote ¹⁵ For these accomplished, experienced artists, theatre's purpose was not merely to entertain and offer diversion, but also to function as a moral institution, as the place where—again, to quote Hirschfeld—“an image of human beingness that encompasses its manifold nature, with the full breadth of its given potential, seen from every possible point of view, would repeatedly be put up for discussion.”Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, because all of the emigrant artists were in exile either because of their political beliefs or due to religious faith or sexual orientation (or some combination thereof), they felt duty-bound to use their work to stage resistance against Fascism to whatever extent possible.Footnote ¹⁷ As such, the ensemble of exiles that Hirschfeld helped Rieser assemble in the wake of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany infused the Schauspielhaus with a more urgent political and social purpose than Rieser—who was purportedly mainly interested in actors who “could wear a tailcoat”—had originally bargained for.Footnote ¹⁸

The second way in which Hirschfeld was influential, of course, was in his capacity as dramaturg. Hirschfeld brought to Zürich a distinct understanding of the role of theatre in society, one influenced by both his aesthetic leaning toward “realism” in the theatre and his leftist–humanist political orientation. Although Hirschfeld was a close collaborator with Hartung, he did not share Hartung's affinity for expressionism, which, in the postwar period, Hirschfeld called the “dehumanizing of theatre” and came to associate with the rise of Fascism.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead, Hirschfeld advocated for a theatre of “humanist realism,” in which both play and actor sought to put a “reality” onstage that depicted “the human being as human being and in the totality of his psychological and sociological connections.”Footnote ²⁰ As I outline in more detail below, this interest in using theatre to explore the complexity and ambiguity of human experience would be a key factor in Hirschfeld's programming of an international repertoire at the Schauspielhaus. As a dramaturg and director in Darmstadt, Hirschfeld had worked on a variety of both classic and modern works, and he had developed both a broad knowledge of contemporary theatre and a growing network of acquaintance among contemporary playwrights and other theatre artists.Footnote ²¹ Having helped to gather a group of like-minded colleagues in Zürich, Hirschfeld now worked with them to transform the theatre's mission. In 1976 actor Wolfgang Heinz described to historian Werner Mittenzwei how, during Rieser's tenure, select members of the ensemble (a group they named, in English, “Gentleman-Agreement”) met weekly with Hirschfeld not only to read and propose plays for the season, but also to discuss how best to cast and interpret both classical and modern plays, all with the express purpose of using the theatre to counter Fascism. Hirschfeld's considerable knowledge of dramatic literature was invaluable to this task. But perhaps even more important was his political savvy in getting the selected plays into the repertoire. Mittenzwei notes that Hirschfeld had the difficult task of “pushing these proposals past Rieser…. The main goal was to … get political plays into the season and squeeze out the popular entertainment.”Footnote ²² He was successful: in the 1933–4 season, among a slate of classics and boulevard comedies, the Schauspielhaus produced several new works by exiled German authors and contemporary international playwrights, among them two plays that were expressly critical of Nazi racial policies—Ferdinand Bruckner's Race and Friedrich Wolf's Professor Mannheim.Footnote ²³

Hirschfeld's relationship with Rieser was a rocky one, however, and in the spring of 1934 Rieser fired Hirschfeld after discovering that Hirschfeld had secreted in his desk drawer several letters of dismissal that Rieser had, in a fit of anger, given him to pass on to company members; Rieser was also, apparently, piqued over Hirschfeld's refusal to be his spy among other members of the company. Hirschfeld's dismissal from the theatre meant that he no longer had the work permit that allowed him to remain in Switzerland. With help from friends, he arranged to travel to Moscow in the summer of 1934, where he spent the next two years serving as a correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung [New Zürich Newspaper] and also working as assistant director to Vsevolod Meyerhold. In the spring of 1936, Hirschfeld's engagement as a guest director at the Basel Stadttheater secured him the documentation to return to Switzerland; the ensuing two years found him again in Zürich, working as an editor and reviewer for publisher Emil Oprecht. During this time, although he was not officially employed by the Schauspielhaus, Hirschfeld seems to have kept in constant contact with his old colleagues and served as a resource and advisor to the efforts by the members of the emigrant ensemble to bring more socially engaged work onto the stage—as Huonker notes, “There is little doubt that he also unofficially helped set the course for the ‘Gentleman-Agreement’ from 1934 to 1938.”Footnote ²⁴

When in 1938 Ferdinand Rieser announced his plans to step down as owner and manager of the theatre—a development that put the emigrant artists at the Schauspielhaus at risk of losing their work permits and facing deportation and arrest by the Nazis—Hirschfeld worked behind the scenes to rescue the theatre by helping to negotiate a private–public partnership between a group of investors, spearheaded by Oprecht and other prominent Zürich business owners, and the Zürich city council, which eventually led to the establishment of the “Neue Schauspiel AG” [New Playhouse Company] as a municipal theatre and the appointment of Oscar Wälterlin as the theatre's new artistic director.Footnote ²⁵ In late summer 1938, Hirschfeld again took up the reins as the theatre's resident dramaturg and occupied that position until 1961, when he was promoted to artistic director of the theatre, a post he held until his death from lung cancer in 1964. Throughout World War II, then, Hirschfeld was the driving force behind season planning for “the only free stage of high artistic rank in the German-speaking lands,” and in the decades that followed the war he continued to use his power over the repertory to earn the Schauspielhaus “European significance and international standing.”Footnote ²⁶

The Repertoire—Overview and Context

The lists of plays produced during Hirschfeld's tenure as the theatre's dramaturg reveal a number of broad patterns (Fig. 2). To begin with, the repertoire was characterized by a heavy rotation of classical works from the Western canon. In addition to the occasional Greek tragedy, audiences received a steady diet of Goethe, Lessing, and Schiller. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European canon was also well-represented, with plays by Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Calderón, Lope de Vega, and Goldoni. In addition, the programming drew heavily not only on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German and Austrian authors—Kleist, Büchner, Wedekind, Hebbel, Hauptmann, Grillparzer, Hofmannsthal, and Nestroy—but also regularly presented plays by the major European and British writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like Gogol, Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilde, Tolstoy, Scribe, Strindberg, Pirandello, Shaw, and Synge. Thus already, even before we take the twentieth-century world- and German-language premieres into account, we see a commitment to internationalism and eclecticism in the selection of classical works and in the range of time periods and national literatures represented.

Figure 2.

“Anhang: Auswahl von seit 1933 im Schauspielhaus Zürich gespielten Stücken in chronologischer Reihenfolge” [Appendix: Selection of Plays Produced at the Schauspielhaus Zürich since 1933 in Chronological Order], from Theresa Giehse et al., Theater: Meinungen und Erfahrungen (Affoltern am Albis: Aehren Verlag, 1945), 59–61.

When we focus on the new and contemporary works produced at the Schauspielhaus, four generalizations can be made from an overview of the data. The first is a trend toward the inclusion of new works from Europe and abroad, and particularly from France and the United States. The records in the archives are incomplete, but to date I have been able to determine that between 1933 and 1960 at least 115 contemporary works translated from another language were produced on the Zürich stage (Fig. 3); around three-quarters of those were German-language premieres, and in several cases the Zürich production represented the very first production outside the playwright's native country. Indeed, in many of these years the number of new plays in translation equaled, if not exceeded, the number of new works originally written in German.

Figure 3.

List of international plays produced at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, 1933–60.

The second remarkable feature is the timeliness of many of these productions; in many cases, the Zürich production occurred very shortly after the play's writing or its native-language premiere. Taken together with the fact that, during and right after the war, the Schauspielhaus also presented world premieres of plays by leading German and Austrian playwrights like Friedrich Wolf, Georg Kaiser, Carl Zuckmayer, Else Lasker-Schüler, Bertolt Brecht, and Ferdinand Bruckner, in addition to Swiss writers Frisch and Dürrenmatt, this contemporaneity put Zürich at the center of international theatrical trends.

A third broad pattern we can discern from an overview of plays produced is a trend toward the inclusion of relatively challenging, more formally and topically diverse works. Only a handful of the international plays produced in Zürich would fall into the category of “popular entertainment,” and among the foreign works are some of the most difficult plays in the dramatic literature of the time—for example, Paul Claudel's The Satin Slipper, which would run eleven hours if performed in its entirety, or Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophically challenging The Flies.

And a final, fourth generalization that can be drawn about the programming at the Schauspielhaus during and just after the war is that it almost exclusively featured works written by European and American men. There is not a single non-Western work represented in any of the lists I have found, nor any works by any non-Caucasian writers; moreover, only a tiny fraction—perhaps three or four—of the hundreds of plays produced were written by women. This is hardly surprising or even particularly noteworthy, given the historical period; I call attention to it only because even though, as I soon elaborate, the selection of international works aimed at putting onstage (to quote Hirschfeld again) “the human being as human being and in the totality of his psychological and sociological connections,” the lack of racial and gender diversity among the writers represented points to the limits of that totality (and vividly reveals the implicit biases at work in canon formation).Footnote ²⁷

What Zürich audiences also saw very little of in the seven war years after the Schauspielhaus became a municipal theatre in 1938 were pointedly political plays, particularly unequivocally anti-Fascist works. As several historians have pointed out, as a private businessman running a purely commercial enterprise Rieser had enjoyed much greater freedom to stage work that was directly critical of the Nazis, and even though he was primarily interested in providing light entertainment to his audiences, he did produce a number of plays that raised hackles among Swiss “frontists” sympathetic to the Third Reich.Footnote ²⁸ Once the Schauspielhaus came under the public purview, however, it had to be more circumspect.Footnote ²⁹ Even though Switzerland never came under Nazi control, when the cultural ministry of the Third Reich began to pursue its policy of Gleichschaltung (cultural conformity) across German-language territories it put Swiss German theatres under enormous pressure to steer clear of work critical of the Nazi regime and its policies. It did this through strict policing of Reich theatre artists who crossed the border to work in Switzerland, through infiltration of Swiss theatres with Nazi sympathizers, and through diplomatic pressures at the top levels of government.Footnote ³⁰ Yet although Switzerland had its own nationalist faction eager to “Swissify” cultural institutions and purge them of “foreign influence,” the discourse that eventually prevailed staunchly defended Switzerland's status as a political democracy. Switzerland—a country situated geographically between France, Italy, and Germany and constituted as a confederation of diverse linguistic and cultural communities—imagined itself, in opposition to the Third Reich, as a “voluntary nation,” and, as such, needed to find ways to define and police its “spiritual” borders as well as its physical ones.Footnote ³¹ Literature and theatre were seen as key to unifying the Swiss nation and delineating its national characteristics, among which was the defining quality of “neutrality.”Footnote ³² The internationalism Hirschfeld fostered at the Schauspielhaus was thus, to a certain extent, a strategic response to the call for theatre to play its role in Switzerland's “spiritual national defense,” a task that took on fresh urgency in the late 1930s with the Nazi annexation of German-speaking lands in Austria and Czechoslovakia. The brochure for the 1938–9 season of the Schauspielhaus—the first under the Wälterlin–Hirschfeld leadership team—connects the dots clearly:

A diverse, international repertory met the mandate of “spiritual national defense” both by mirroring Switzerland's own intrinsic “internationalism” and by positioning the theatre as an institution above the fray, one that was looking out for new works and new ideas in all directions and offering an “impartial” range of social, political, and cultural perspectives.

In reality, however, Hirschfeld's purposes in programming an international repertory were anything but “impartial.” He deliberately used the power of season planning to counter Fascist ideology by, on the one hand, depicting a diverse range of perspectives that depicted “the human being … in the totality of his psychological and sociological connections” and, on the other, fostering free and open discussion of the political and social issues they represented.Footnote ³⁴ As Hirschfeld himself recalled in a postwar lecture, it was in the international arena that he found modern plays that “had something to say about the particular situation that people and society were in during these extremely crucial and dangerous years.”Footnote ³⁵ This “something” that they had to say was, of course, not just one thing; it was an article of Hirschfeld's faith that theatre's job was not to tell an audience what to think, but rather to pose difficult questions and spur audience members to deep listening and lively discussion. “The theatre is a forum and not a pulpit,” Hirschfeld claimed in that same lecture:

The international repertory, then, was an antidote to the tyranny of the pulpit, with its singular and unified truth, and a rebuke to Fascist nationalist insistence on ideological and spiritual conformity. It offered instead a unity based on shared intellectual inquiry and doubt—a unity readily alignable to a discourse of Swiss “spiritual national defense” that put the Swiss spirit up on a mountain peak surveying valleys far and near full of competing ideas.

Hirschfeld's programming of an international repertoire required not just strategic savviness but also tenacity and fortitude, particularly once the war was in full swing and Zürich was essentially cut off from the rest of Europe.Footnote ³⁷ The story of how Hirschfeld managed to learn about and get his hands on new plays from around the world is the subject of a future research project; what the archives have yielded so far is a clear picture of both his determination and his success in regularly programming new international work in translation on the Zürich stage. Important to emphasize here is how much the Schauspielhaus programming contrasted with what audiences were seeing in the rest of Europe during this period, particularly on German-language stages. Recent histories of theatre under the Third Reich have revealed the importance of theatre as an arm of the cultural propaganda war waged by the Nazis: as Gerwin Strobl persuasively documents, one way the Nazis could prove their cultural superiority over the “decadent” and “failed” Weimar Republic was by showering “unprecedented largesse” on a theatrical industry that had been shuttered in the thirties in the wake of Weimar's economic collapse.Footnote ³⁸ From January 1933 until all theatres in occupied Europe were closed on 31 August 1944, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels both established and funded local theatres, and sent lavish productions on tour throughout the Third Reich. But very quickly Nazi theatrical programming became dominated by works from the classical canon and by light entertainment, producing a uniformity of cultural expression. As Anselm Heinrich notes,

Though the German-language stages under Nazi occupation were by no means German-only—audiences saw plenty of Shakespeare and (rather perversely) Shaw, for example—the repertoire was decidedly nationalist in both content and purpose: “Audiences … were entertained with an ordinary, brutally trivial repertoire at give-away prices. Hannah Arendt's dictum of the ‘banality of evil’ never rang more true.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus Hirschfeld's programming of serious, socially engaged drama from a diversity of cultures was a trenchant and purposeful statement of contrast to the theatrical fare offered to audiences living under the Nazi regime.

No theatre in France, Italy, or England offered a repertoire with a slate of contemporary plays of international diversity comparable to that of the Schauspielhaus either. After French theatres were nationalized and placed under Vichy control in 1941, the repertoire became dominated by French melodramas and classics (Molière in particular); modern writers had to submit their works for approval by both a Vichy censor and a German censor.Footnote ⁴¹ In Italy, although no discernably “Fascist” theatre ever developed, all plays produced had to first be approved by the censor as well, and only a limited subset of new plays were approved for production.Footnote ⁴² Andrew Davies's brief survey of theatre in England during the war indicates that virtually no contemporary drama in translation was staged there during this period either; the repertoires of British stages were dominated by classics (particularly Shakespeare, but also the Greeks, Shaw, and Ibsen) and contemporary British dramatists—that is, Terrence Rattigan, Peter Ustinov, Emlyn Williams, and J. B. Priestley. Only the stages in Switzerland and Sweden remained free of the pressures of Fascism, and while stages in Basel and in Stockholm both produced international work, the Zürich Schauspielhaus was distinguished by both the variety and longevity of its internationalist vision.Footnote ⁴³

Theatre as a Forum & the Twentieth-Century Dramatic Canon

I turn now to look at some of the key international plays produced on the Zürich stage, and to unpack what they meant to Hirschfeld and to the Schauspielhaus audience. My selection of plays is drawn, as I mentioned at the outset, from Hirschfeld's own writing, in which the same names and works surface repeatedly, ones that he believed confirmed the diversity of human existence and countered Fascist ideologies.Footnote ⁴⁴ These names included French authors Paul Claudel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Giraudoux; the Spanish Federico García Lorca and Italian Luigi Pirandello; British writer T. S. Eliot; and American writers John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller.

Among the French authors mentioned, Jean Giraudoux was the earliest to have his works produced at the Schauspielhaus, and more of his plays received their German-language premiere at the Schauspielhaus than any other modern French playwright. As early as 1930 Rieser had produced his play Amphitryon 38, and in January 1937 the theatre presented Giraudoux's play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, just a year after its Paris opening. Giraudoux's pessimistic vision of the futility of diplomacy and inevitability of war in this play would prove to be far more resonant with postwar German audiences than with the prewar Zürich audience; as Mittenzwei notes, in 1937 the critics admired Giraudoux's evident pacifism, but “the pressing question of how wars are made, which played such a large role in the discussion of the play after 1945, was not even posed at this point.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Three years later, in 1940, the theatre premiered Giraudoux's Ondine for German-speaking audiences, just under a year after its Paris opening, and in January 1944 it presented the German-language premiere of Sodom and Gomorrah, only three months after the play premiered in Paris. Ondine is considered by many to be Giraudoux's finest work, and, according to one historian, director Leonard Steckel's production of the play was “one of the most poetic productions” of the Schauspielhaus.Footnote ⁴⁶ Sodom and Gomorrah was less well-received in Zürich, but nonetheless Hirschfeld continued to champion Giraudoux's work, even after the writer's death at the end of January 1944. For Hirschfeld, Giraudoux's pessimism was a fundamental expression of the contemporary European experience, and his drama posed the sort of important and painful question that gives theatre its essential purpose. “The greatness of this drama consists not in the answer, but rather in the question,” Hirschfeld later wrote of Giraudoux's plays.Footnote ⁴⁷

Just after the war's end, in June 1946, the Schauspielhaus produced the German-language premiere of one of Giraudoux's best-known works, The Madwoman of Chaillot. In his talk “Perspectives on German Theatre” Hirschfeld explained his reasons for bringing this poetic satire to Zürich: “The play expresses a revolutionary conservatism that puts forward for discussion the problem of anonymity in the modern world, the problem of capitalism, the problems of memory, of fear, of destruction and preservation, of friendship and love.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Hirschfeld here, as in so many of his choices, was remarkably prescient about the value of this play for modern audiences: The Madwoman of Chaillot continues to the present day to demonstrate its worth in the dramatic repertoire around the world, as its depiction of a conflict between rapacious capitalists, heedless of the environmental impact of their greed, and the “crazy” people who band together to defeat them gains new relevance against the backdrop of contemporary ecological crises. In the fifties, under Hirschfeld's continued dramaturgical leadership, the Schauspielhaus persisted in championing Giraudoux, presenting the German-language premieres of Siegfried in 1950, Duel of Angels (Pour Lucrèce) and The Enchanted (Intermezzo) in 1955, and even the world premiere of his son Jean-Pierre Giraudoux's Immortelle (as Die Unsterbliche) in 1957.Footnote ⁴⁹

A second important French dramatist introduced to German-speaking audiences through Hirschfeld's efforts was Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the dominant figures of French intellectual life in the twentieth century. In October 1944 the Schauspielhaus presented the German-language premiere of The Flies, Sartre's 1943 reworking of the Electra–Orestes story from Greek mythology. Although the drama was not particularly well-received by Zürich audiences or critics, Hirschfeld saw it as one of the key plays produced at the Schauspielhaus during the war, because it grappled with, among other things, the problem of what comes après la guerre.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, The Flies was a play that spoke, in both form and content, to Hirschfeld's understanding of theatre as a forum, as the place that sparks dialogue and debate. Hirschfeld defended the play's difficulty:

And although the play had a very short run—it closed after seven performances—it had the desired effect among those who saw it. Günther Schoop reports: “The carefully cultivated contact between stage and audience was activated through the production of this play…. Seldom was a public gathering so evenly divided ‘for’ and ‘against’ as the one at the emotional evening of discussion hosted by the Zürich Theatre Association on October 19.”Footnote ⁵²

Sartre's plays, too, would continue to be featured in the Schauspielhaus repertory in the postwar era. His play Dirty Hands had its German-language premiere in Zürich in 1948, just half a year after it opened in Paris, and The Devil and the Good Lord debuted in German at the Schauspielhaus in November 1951, less than six months after its Paris premiere. The next year saw the world premiere of Sartre's scenario In the Mesh on the Zürich stage, and in 1960 the Schauspielhaus presented the first German production of Sartre's next-to-last play, The Condemned of Altona. In all, five of Sartre's plays debuted for German audiences in Zürich.

The third major modern French playwright whose works were featured for the first time in German at the Schauspielhaus was Paul Claudel. His play The Satin Slipper premiered there in April 1944, just five months after it was first directed in Paris by Jean-Louis Barrault. This long and complicated drama has only recently begun to receive productions in its entirety; director Kurt Horwitz followed Barrault's lead in shortening the text for the first Zürich audience. For Hirschfeld, the deep commitment to Catholic belief that drives the energy of this play represented an antidote to both Sartre's existentialism and Giraudoux's pessimism; as a counterpoint to other works in the repertoire The Satin Slipper stimulated the kind of discussion and debate he saw as the cornerstone of theatre's function. In addition, he greatly admired Claudel's innovative use of an eclectic mix of theatrical forms and conventions.Footnote ⁵³ “Formally,” Hirschfeld wrote, “Claudel's The Satin Slipper is probably the most linguistically powerful writing of modern France.”Footnote ⁵⁴

As challenging as Claudel's play is, both technically and in terms of storytelling, the original Zürich production introduced into the German dramatic repertoire a play that has since been extraordinarily popular on German-speaking stages. Whereas in France Claudel's play has received relatively sporadic production in the past seventy-five years, since 1944 The Satin Slipper has been produced nearly annually in Switzerland, Germany, or Austria, by dozens of different theatres. According to theatre historian Christèle Barbier, in 1985 alone there were twenty productions of the play in German (as opposed to just six in all of France for that year). She speculates that the appeal of this play to German-speaking audiences may be its depiction of a world without a center of gravity, in which the hero is brought to renounce conquest and possession—a moral that would have resonated strongly in West Germany and Austria in the postwar years.Footnote ⁵⁵ This may also explain why Hirschfeld found Claudel's play so compelling, even though its Catholicism did not speak to his own religious or ideological views. In addition to The Satin Slipper, Hirschfeld also programmed Claudel's controversial play The Hostage in 1945—which raised objections among many audience members for its valorization of total submission to the authority of the church—as well as his The Humiliation of the Father in 1946 and Tobias and Sara in 1953.

Of the contemporary English-language works that premiered at the Schauspielhaus in German translation during and just after the war, many came out of the United Kingdom, although a lot of these were comedies or sentimental plays that have since passed into relative obscurity. The year 1939 saw the German-language premiere of British-Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams's psychological thriller Night Must Fall, J. B. Priestley's drama Time and the Conways, and Esther McCracken's light comedy Quiet Wedding. In 1942 the Schauspielhaus opened Emlyn Williams's sentimental drama The Morning Star just a week after it closed on Broadway, and in 1944 the theatre premiered Scottish writer A. J. Cronin's sentimental romance Jupiter Laughs. Of the major figures in drama, George Bernard Shaw was the most popular British writer in Zürich; nine of his plays were produced between 1933 and 1964, including the German-language premiere of You Never Can Tell in 1935, and the world premieres of Village Wooing in 1934 and Shaw's last full-length play, Buoyant Billions, in 1948.

The most experimental and modern of the contemporary British authors featured at the Schauspielhaus was T. S. Eliot. His play The Family Reunion received its German-language premiere in Zürich in 1945; Murder in the Cathedral opened there in 1947.Footnote ⁵⁶ In addition, Eliot's later, more accessible plays The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman were also performed in Switzerland for the first time at the Schauspielhaus in 1951, 1954, and 1960, respectively. In his lectures and writings on theatre, Hirschfeld mentions Eliot in connection with other modern foreign writers as a dramatist whose formal experimentations serve the purpose of producing a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt: “their objective is always to make us sit up and take notice, to force us to reflect, to interrupt the audience's willingness to empathize and go along, in order to provoke thinking. Their function is to make the audience active.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Even more so than the British, American writers played a prominent role in the Schauspielhaus repertoire, and Hirschfeld and Wälterlin can be credited for having brought many of the twentieth century's most significant American playwrights to European attention. One of the earliest “imports” from the United States was Thornton Wilder's Our Town, given the German title Eine kleine Stadt. Wilder's play already had a connection to Zürich long before it opened there in March 1939, just three months after it closed its Broadway premiere. Wilder had written much of it, and perhaps all of the final act, while staying in a hotel in Rüschlikon, a suburb of Zürich, in the fall of 1937.Footnote ⁵⁸ Wilder was famously well-connected among the literary and artistic lights of the time, being friends with Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and the German director Max Reinhardt, through whom he also became acquainted with Thomas Mann, who was still living near Zürich in 1937 and who shared a social circle with Hirschfeld.Footnote ⁵⁹ It may have been through Mann that Wilder and Hirschfeld struck up what was to be an amicable and long-lived professional relationship; after the war, in 1950, Hirschfeld would introduce Wilder to his friend Hans Sahl, who retranslated all of Wilder's plays into German (and also translated the work of many other major American playwrights, including Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller).Footnote ⁶⁰ The version of Our Town produced at the Schauspielhaus in 1939, however, was translated by Wilfried Scheitlin, one of the company's actors and, according to some sources, Oskar Wälterlin's life partner.Footnote ⁶¹

In its depiction of, as Wilder put it, “all the big subjects” of life in a “little play,” Our Town poses compelling questions with universal appeal.Footnote ⁶² Hirschfeld and Wälterlin were prescient in recognizing that appeal: the production at the Zürich Schauspielhaus was one of the first outside the United States. It was also one of the first plays Wälterlin directed at the Schauspielhaus. The play was relatively well received by the Zürich audience, even though, according to an essay in the archives (possibly a draft of a program note on Wilder written by Hirschfeld), “at first glance the work flummoxed spectators through both form and content.”Footnote ⁶³ Nevertheless, the essay goes on to say, “those who dealt with it in more depth were enraptured by its unpretentious and yet … enthralling mode of expression and were deeply impressed by the insights represented there into human life, its limits, and its connections with something more-than-human.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Certainly the play had the desired effect of stimulating discussion among audience members: in an article written for the Swiss monthly magazine Du [You], Wälterlin recalled that the theatre's leadership had to find a new room for the discussion of this play, one large enough to accommodate all the people who wanted to participate.Footnote ⁶⁵ And although the play only had ten performances, it had a material impact beyond its psychosocial effect on audiences who saw it: according to Penelope Niven, Wilder's most recent biographer, after the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Wilder, “[l]ooking about for even some small way to help … made arrangements to give his Swiss Our Town royalties to an Austrian-German exile fund”—an act of generosity that cannot have remained unknown to Hirschfeld or to the rest of the Zürich exile community.Footnote ⁶⁶

Much more impactful for the European theatre was Wilder's second major play, The Skin of Our Teeth, which also received its German-language premiere at the Schauspielhaus, in March 1944, just six months after it closed on Broadway. In a 1963 radio program looking back at the history of the Schauspielhaus, Hirschfeld described the lengths he had to go through to obtain a copy of Wilder's play. The shorthand notes of that interview read: “1944. During the war no direct postal connection with America. American Leg. Council had play sent through Sweden to Bern embassy. Small photographed plates that had to be copied first.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The Schauspielhaus gave this play to Gentiane Helene Gebser (wife of the exiled poet and philosopher Jean Gebser) to translate, and once again Oskar Wälterlin directed.

The Skin of Our Teeth is far more complicated and challenging in both form and content than Our Town. But in its challenges and ambiguities, the play exemplified the “humanist realism” that Hirschfeld sought to promote. As the essay on Wilder in Hirschfeld's archives puts it: “In [the character of] Mr. Antrobus, The Skin of Our Teeth shows us our own reflection, our confusions and our entanglements in the present catastrophe.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The play's open form, which steals elements from farce, burlesque, satire, commedia dell'arte, and from Pirandello and Brecht, allowed it to offer a reflection on history that spoke particularly poignantly to the Zürich audience in 1944. The essay writer observes that, with this play,

Perhaps for this reason, The Skin of Our Teeth went on to become one of the most popular American plays in the postwar German repertoire and helped cement Wilder's status as one of the most highly regarded American writers in Germany during his lifetime.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Schauspielhaus's introduction of this play to German-speaking audiences in Switzerland thus served to bring an important voice to the theatre culture of postwar Germany, that of one of the “most important champions … for a … theatre in which we come together to take the path that leads us away from division and separation and to a redeeming clarity, to a perpetual affirmation of everything that in the truest sense means life.”Footnote ⁷¹

In the postwar years, Hirschfeld continued to program an international slate of plays, for both practical and philosophical reasons. On the practical side, the end of the war revealed not only the material destruction wrought by the Nazis, but also the cultural destruction. In his talk “Perspectives on German Theatre,” which appears to have been written in late 1945 or 1946, Hirschfeld explains: “At one time we believed that when the war was over and National Socialism was dead and gone, the drawers would open up, and out of them would come some good stuff that had been written during the years of oppression. As of yet, unfortunately, we've seen nothing of the sort.”Footnote ⁷² In the meantime, Hirschfeld promised, they would continue to look abroad for plays by modern authors “that could build the foundation for dialogue and discussion.”Footnote ⁷³ Hirschfeld's correspondence from these postwar years reveals his tireless networking with contacts in New York, Paris, and London to get recommendations for new plays and to secure the rights to premiere foreign works in Zürich. In the years after the war ended, the Schauspielhaus produced a number of new works by French playwrights, including Jean Cocteau's The Eagle Has Two Heads in 1946, Jean Anouilh's Eurydice in 1947, and Albert Camus's The Just Assassins in 1950. The postwar years also saw the German-language premieres of works by British writers Christopher Fry and John Osborne, the Italian playwrights Luigi Pirandello and Silvio Giovaninetti, and the Spanish dramatist Alejandro Casona. But perhaps the greatest service the Schauspielhaus provided to postwar European theatre came in its introduction of new American plays and playwrights, writers like William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, William Saroyan, and, in particular, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. The German translator to all these American playwrights was Hirschfeld's lifelong friend Hans Sahl, who had emigrated to New York in 1942, and who also frequently assisted Hirschfeld in obtaining the rights to the German-language, and in some cases European, premieres of American plays. In 1947 Zürich audiences were among the first Europeans to see Williams's play The Glass Menagerie, and in 1949 the Schauspielhaus presented the German-language premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire a month before the play closed on Broadway in New York.Footnote ⁷⁴ Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman premiered in Zürich in the same season, in one of the very first productions to bring Miller's work to a non-Anglophone audience.Footnote ⁷⁵

From the evidence in his archives it can be deduced that Hirschfeld was personally not a great admirer of either Williams or Miller, both of whom he considered “second-rate”:Footnote ⁷⁶ in one letter he reminds Sahl of a conversation they had in which “I laid out for you rather precisely what I have against Death of a Salesman,”Footnote ⁷⁷ and in another he responds to Sahl's negative review of Williams's play Sweet Bird of Youth: “We're no huge fans of this writer.”Footnote ⁷⁸ But Hirschfeld recognized the value of these two authors’ work nonetheless; in his lecture “Problems of Modern Dramaturgy” Hirschfeld observed that their plays show

Rather faint and backhanded praise, to be sure; but, as it turns out, quite prophetic.

Which brings me to the final set of observations I want to make about the Schauspielhaus as an “international stage” and the role Kurt Hirschfeld may have played in shaping the modern canon. First, the impact of Hirschfeld and the Schauspielhaus on postwar European theatre can hardly be overstated. In his programming of modern international works, Hirschfeld maintained an artistic and philosophical continuity at the Schauspielhaus that allowed theatre as an art to move forward in Europe despite the fact that nearly every other European theatre on the Continent was either shut down or under Fascist control.Footnote ⁸⁰ The influence of the Schauspielhaus on postwar German theatre has long been widely recognized by Swiss and German theatre historians. As Henning Rischbieter observed in 1984, during the war and in the first few years afterward the Playhouse formulated in advance “what constituted the share of contemporary international drama in the repertory of the German stages after 1945, at least in the three Western zones of occupation… . [Kurt Hirschfeld] saw a born-of-necessity, once-in-a-lifetime dramaturgical opportunity and used it masterfully; he crucially predetermined the repertorial structure of the postwar West German theatre.”Footnote ⁸¹ But beyond that, as Christopher Innes has observed, Hirschfeld's commitment to importing new American plays to Switzerland also had a profound impact on postwar European theatre as a whole. American writers “served as models of a new stylistic freedom and social relevance that helped to liberate theatre elsewhere. Their work was staged in all the European centres, which had been cut off from foreign developments during the war… . Miller and Williams, along with Thornton Wilder, were the general catalyst for a revival in Europe.”Footnote ⁸² The primary conduit for these authors’ entry into the postwar German theatre was the Zürich Schauspielhaus, and despite whatever personal misgivings Hirschfeld may have had toward some of their plays, he understood their significance both to the Schauspielhaus and to theatre history: “Is there nothing new in America?” he pleads in a letter from January 1951 to Hans Sahl; “We're going to be in a really tight spot in the coming season if we can't import at least two good plays from over there.”Footnote ⁸³ The American authors Hirschfeld was able to discover through his network of New York informants not only attracted audiences, but also injected critical fresh energy into the European theatre scene.

Moreover, the slate of modern, international plays produced at the Schauspielhaus was fertile soil for the blossoming of the two great Swiss playwrights of the postwar period, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch, whose plays clearly show the influence of exposure to writers like Wilder, Brecht, and Pirandello.Footnote ⁸⁴ Hirschfeld was right: there really were no important German plays tucked away in drawers or attics waiting to be produced in the immediate postwar era; Dürrenmatt and Frisch essentially jump-started German language drama anew after the war, “dominat[ing] the stage of the early ’fifties,” as Peter Demetz observed.Footnote ⁸⁵ Thus Hirschfeld's legacy extends not only to the repertorial structure of postwar German theatre, but also to the generation of postwar German and Austrian playwrights whose own work builds on and responds to the formal innovations and thematic provocations found in Frisch and Dürrenmatt, as well as in the work of Brecht, Wilder, and the other writers the Schauspielhaus nurtured during the war years.

And finally, Hirschfeld's influence might possibly also be seen in the canonical status that so many of the works he programmed went on to achieve during the twentieth century. Noteworthy, in hindsight, is his track record in selecting plays that would later become “twentieth-century classics.” Of the roughly thirty-six American works produced during his tenure, seventeen—or about half—continue to be regularly staged over a half-century later, and several—Our Town, Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Iceman Cometh—are solidly ensconced in the twentieth-century American canon, read by most high school or college students in the country, and regularly revived and produced. With regard to the French authors featured on the Schauspielhaus stage, Sartre and Anouilh have firm places in the French canon, and Giraudoux and Claudel have each had a season of Paris's Theatre du Nord-Ouest devoted to their works. Though Claudel continues to be more well-known on German stages than elsewhere in the world, Sartre, Giraudoux, and Anouilh regularly find places in the season plans of theatres across the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe. Moreover, whereas only three contemporary plays from Spain received production in Zürich during the time under consideration, two of them—Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba and his Blood Wedding—have become standard plays in the international canon. Since one way dramatic literature enters the canon is through production, we might moot the possibility that Hirschfeld's inclusion of all of these works in the Schauspielhaus repertory served to give them the exposure, recognition, and production continuity that led to their “canonization.” This is, of course, something of a chicken-and-egg historical question, because we can't rewind history to find out if these plays would have had an afterlife without their Schauspielhaus debut. But certainly given that, as Mittenzwei notes, during the war the playhouse produced “all of the plays of bourgeois modernism that determined both the repertoire of the German theatre and the audience's interests in the early postwar period,” it does not seem too great a stretch to propose that the Zürich Schauspielhaus, through the programming of dramaturg Kurt Hirschfeld, may have helped shape and determine the mid-twentieth-century Western dramatic canon.Footnote ⁸⁶

A corollary of that claim points to a potential historic irony: the mid-twentieth-century modern dramatic canon—with its appeals to universality, its focus on the individual, and its tendencies to avoid staking out strong ideological positions—may consequently have been shaped at least in part by the Swiss discourse of “neutrality” and “spiritual national defense,” a discourse that led Hirschfeld to what can be seen as essentially a compromise strategy that cloaked the fight against Fascism in the language of bourgeois liberalism.Footnote ⁸⁷ This is an irony not lost on Hirschfeld's contemporaries; as the Marxist German-Jewish literary scholar Hans Mayer, who also emigrated to Switzerland in 1934, observed in 1945:

Hirschfeld's season planning—grounded, as he claimed, in “humanist realism”—served both Swiss “spiritual national defense” and the ideal of liberal democracy by provoking debate and discussion; yet in its love of ambiguity and “question-posing” rather than “answer-providing,” the canon of plays he preserved and passed on to the postwar German and European theatre might be characterized, in a less flattering light, as one that also encapsulated neutrality's refusal to take a firm moral, political, and/or ideological stand.

My claim about Hirschfeld's influence on the canon may be overstated; certainly it's one that we'll never have the evidence to fully ground. But it is undoubtedly true that during and just after the war, a slate of Western playwrights received international exposure in Zürich, on “the only important free German-speaking stage on a continent held captive by Adolf Hitler,”Footnote ⁸⁹ and that European, and especially German, audiences gained access to these important, paradigm-shifting, and now-canonical works largely due to Kurt Hirschfeld's tireless and steadfast commitment to finding, presenting, and promoting international plays. As such, the legacy of the Zürich Schauspielhaus as an international theatre, and that of Hirschfeld as a key figure in twentieth-century theatre history, have, until now, far outstripped their fame.