Transforming in public: Jewish actors on the German expressionist stage

German expressionist theatre was a highly physical endeavor. During its short-lived stage life, approximately 1909-1922,1 the typical expressionist themes of rebellion, transformation, and regeneration took plastic shape through a new theatrical body language that later also became one of the trademarks of expressionist film. Expressionism was to German modernism what surrealism was to France and futurism to Italy: the stylistic or aesthetic innovation most closely identified with its entrance into the changed realities of the twentieth century.2 Unlike surrealism and futurism, however, which were led by artist-ideologues such as André Breton and F. T. Marinetti (who formulated manifestoes and gave shape to the emerging styles), expressionism-and especially expressionist theatre-had neither a leader nor a treatise. It evolved through practice: through new plays, innovative productions, and especially the example of a few ground-breaking, paradigmatic performances which shaped the style of acting. As was often noted at the time-sometimes with pride, often with disdain-many of the central designers and practitioners of this highly physical style were of Jewish origin. Jews had been integrating into the German theatre since the mid-nineteenth century, as part of the general process of social integration and acculturation begun with the German Aufklärung (Enlightenment) at the end of the eighteenth century. Unexpectedly, that "integration" developed into a true passion for the theatre, which Bernhard Greiner calls a Jewish "theatromania". He draws parallels between this Jewish "craze" for theatre and the German bourgeoisie's embrace of the eighteenth-century theatres of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, which offered a language and an ethos that facilitated bourgeois class emancipation.3 The question I wish to address is why so many Jewish artists were attracted to the expressionist style that would later be considered the central German modernist idiom. Although Jews were active in most areas of modernist German theatre and culture in general, the innovative, antimimetic locution of expressionism is most often associated with Jewish artists (and not only in the theatre). More than a third of the contributors to Kurt Pinthus's Menschheitsdämmerung: Ein Dokument des Expressionismus (Twilight of Mankind: A Document of Expressionism, 1920), an early and influential anthology of expressionist poetry, were Jews. Karl Otten's 1957 retrospective prose anthology, Ahnung und Aufbruch (Premonition and Awakening), contains an even higher percentage of Jewish writers.4 Two of the three quintessential expressionist actors, Fritz Kortner (born Nathan Kohn in Vienna) and Ernst Deutsch (from Prague), were from traditional Jewish homes. The third great expressionist actor, the non-Jewish Werner Krauss, who often acted with Kortner and Deutsch, later went on to play roles such as Jud Süss for Joseph Goebbels.5 Leopold Jessner, a Jew originally from the East Prussian city of Königsberg (Kaliningrad), was considered the towering expressionist director; and Ernst Toller, from a religious Jewish home in Posen (Poznañe), in Germany's eastern provinces, was among the most influential expressionist playwrights. All of these Jewish artists, no matter how assimilated, record in their letters and autobiographies the frequently noted "difference" in their face and body and sensibility and their repeated encounters with personal and collective anti-Semitism.6 Their consequent sense of not belonging, of being "outsiders" and "strangers," factored into their work in the theatre in various ways. The Jewish experience of exclusion found a fitting idiom in expressionism's basic themes of rebellion and regeneration through personal and collective transformation. As noted below, the typical expressionist hero and world vibrate with anxiety, with a sense of isolation and homelessness. Indeed, isolation and loneliness, according to Egbert Krispyn, are "the central experiences in the life of the Expressionists' generation,"7 caught between the explicit authoritarianism of Wilhelmine Germany and the implicit promise of greater personal autonomy through modernization. This sense of alienation also reflects the distress of pre- and post-World War I Europe, itself on a course of radical upheaval and social, economic, and technological transformation. Young Jewish intellectuals and artists certainly had good reason to share in this Angst, being doubly isolated: as Germans of their generation and as Jews in Germany. And many Jewish artists gave expression to this anxiety. Ernst Toller's alter ego Friedrich, protagonist of his autobiographical play Die Wandlung (Transformation, 1919), is first introduced to us in a state of almost unbearable isolation as he stares through his bedroom window at the Christmas trees glowing in all the other houses. "Outcast," he says of himself: a stranger to the Christians, alienated from his Jewish family, wounded by anti-Semitism. Friedrich, like Toller, escapes from his father's home and volunteers for service in World War I in hope of finding a way to "belong". Toller imbued Friedrich, his first fully drawn dramatic character, with much of the unhappiness and confusion he describes in his autobiography. Like Toller, Friedrich sees himself as Ahasuerus, the German name for the Wandering Jew. "Where were you all day?" the mother asks Friedrich: "Wandering, Mother. Wandering ... As always .... Like Him, Ahasuerus, whose shadow creeps through chained up streets, who hides in pestilential cellars and digs up rotten potatoes in freezing fields outside at night ... Him, the eternal homeless one".8 In the degradation and disease of his images, Toller expresses the despair of perpetual exile. But this despair leads to the utopian hope of becoming-and creating-a New Man, who will transform the world and give rise to a new and better "home" (world).9 For Toller, as for others of his generation, "home" was no longer circumscribed by the family or (especially after World War I) by national boundaries. Toward the end of his autobiography, Eine Jugend in Deutschland (1933, translated as I Was a German), Toller, at one time an ardent German patriot, concludes that his personal identity can no longer be linked to a national source: "And if I were asked where I belong, I would answer that a Jewish mother bore me, Germany nourished me, Europe educated me, my home is the earth, the world my fatherland".10 Similarly, the expressionist poet Iwan (later Yvan) Goll (born Isaac Lang in Alsace-Lorraine) wrote in his autobiographical note in Pinthus's Menschheitsdämmerung: "Iwan Goll has no home: a Jew by fate, born in France by chance, a German by passport".11 Another "displaced" young man in search of a better "home" can be found in Walter Hasenclever's autobiographical play Der Sohn (The Son, 1914). Hasenclever's mother's family was Jewish, and he always carried that "stigma" because he resembled the Jewish side physically: "with burning eyes set in a gaunt dark-skinned face ... flattened nose, and black curly hair". He was especially close to his maternal grandmother.12 The protagonist of Hasenclever's play, based on himself, is a young man thoroughly alienated from home and environment. In his despair, he attempts suicide but is saved by the amorphous figure of the "Friend"-based on Hasenclever's close friend Kurt Hiller, a Jewish poet and intellectual and founder of the literary club Das Gnu (The Antelope), which was dedicated to the new expressionist literature. In 1914 Hasenclever gave his first reading of this play there.13 The Friend shows the Son a different way to escape paternal oppression and spiritual isolation: the way of rebellion against his father and the old world, which all fathers had come to represent. This rebellion culminates in the search for a new "home" in which the Son himself becomes the symbol of the New Man. Both of these youthful characters, Friedrich and the Son, came to be regarded as seminal roles for the emerging expressionist actor who would invent a performance aesthetic that lent a voice and an embodied form to a generation's crisis of identity. The task was a difficult one, since most expressionist plays came without an instruction manual. The "sons'" hallucinatory, often hysterical break with the ethics and aesthetics of the "fathers" required a totally new physical idiom, unlike the naturalistic or romantic acting style of the period. Evidence of this lack can be found in the programmatic "Nachwort an den Schauspieler" (Epilogue to the Actor) that Jewish playwright Paul Kornfeld appended to his expressionist play Die Verführung (The Seduction, written in 1913, published in 1916).14 In this short essay he worried that "as the art of acting has developed over the past few decades" directors and actors might very well "stage it [The Seduction] in a way that runs counter to its spirit". Recognizing that the greatest peril to his Seelendrama (drama of the soul) was a realistic, psychologically nuanced idiom of performance, Kornfeld outlined an acting approach that would allow the inherent subjectivity of expressionism to speak through the actor's body. I argue that many young Jews found a "home" in this theatre of the "soul" and that by stamping their identity on this genre they found a way of assimilating into German culture by changing that culture to include them.