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Review : Exhibitions
The rehabilitation of Gustav Gründgens
Gustav Gründgens —A German Career:
an exhibition at the Berlin Staatsbibliothek
By Stefan Steinberg
29 December 1999
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December 22 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth
of the German actor and theatre director Gustav Gründgens,
a flamboyant radical in the 1920s and early 1930s, who became
one of the Hitler regime's most pliable artistic servants. Following
the Nazi takeover in 1933, and under the direct patronage of Prime
Minister Hermann Goering, Gründgens became director of Berlin's
principal theatre, the Staatstheater, and remained in the job
until near the end of the war in 1944. He is emblematic of the
intellectual who chooses ego and career, even in the service of
monsters, over principle. Gründgens' renegacy and opportunism
were fictionally immortalised in Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto.
As part of the anniversary a number of cinemas in Berlin are
currently showing films featuring Gründgens, a new television
documentary has been produced and Gründgens is also the subject
of an exhibition currently in Berlin, which is set to tour a number
of other German cities.
The exhibition looks at the work and career of Gründgens
under the title “A German Career”. It brings together
posters, correspondence, theatrical miscellany and photographs.
Some of the most notorious photos of Gründgens taken during
the war are on display. In one photo we see a smiling Gründgens
vigorously shaking the hand of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Another photo shows Gründgens squatting in German Reichswehr
army fatigues while brandishing a rifle above his head. The date
is 1943. Gründgens had temporarily relinquished his post
as theatre director to join the army following reverses on the
Eastern Front and Goebbels' subsequent appeal for “Total
War”. Also on display in the exhibition is the German Service
cross with star, the highest award which can be made to a civilian
and which was awarded to Gründgens in 1954 for his services
to post-war German theatre.
At the entrance to the exhibition a poster hangs with a quote
from Gründgens himself in the period following the Second
World War. In large letters it reads: “I want to be regarded
as someone who preserved and nourished the flame in a dark period
and someone who can relate how it was, how it is now and how one
could possibly rebuild.” Many biographical comments on Gründgens
on his hundredth anniversary make the same point. His collaboration
with the Nazis is justified on the basis that through his activities,
Gründgens rescued and maintained a certain artistic tradition.
The Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung refers to Gründgens
as “a participator who did not participate” [i.e., in
the crimes of the fascists]. The Berliner Zeitung writes:
“Gründgens did not abuse the theatre, did not put himself
at the service of ideological terror.” Apologists for Gründgens
also claim that during his period as leader of the Staatstheater
he was able to rescue a number of Jewish and left-wing opponents
of National Socialism. The aim of this article is to examine and
question such assertions.
Who was Gründgens?
Gründgens was born in 1899, the son of a prosperous businessman
whose financial interests were already unravelling at the time
of the birth of his first son, in an economic crisis that peaked
towards the end of the last century. Injured in the First World
War (due to the negligence of an army comrade) Gründgens
began performing for an Army theatre troupe. Already as a young
man Gründgens was determined to make a name for himself.
At 18 he sent a postcard to a friend advising the latter to hold
on to the item because one day he, Gründgens, would be famous
and the card would be valuable.
Following army demobilisation Gründgens attended acting
school and began seeking work on the stage. In fact, the German
theatre was flourishing in the turbulent Weimar years, competition
was intense and Gründgens had to work hard to establish himself.
In 1923 he moved to the Kammerspiele Theatre in Hamburg and between
1923 and 1928 played over 70 roles.
Not everybody at this time was impressed by Gründgens'
acting ability. One of the most perceptive of the German critics,
Herbert Ihering, described Gründgens' appearance in a revue
as “crude and simplistic”. Somewhat against his own
wishes, Gründgens was continually cast as and made a name
for himself playing villains. He is said to have excelled as the
sadist Ottfried in Ferdinand Bruckner's The Criminal and
for a while Gründgens was condemned to playing sharks, arrogant
snobs, social climbers, as well as morally unstable and neurotic
types.
Already by the middle of the twenties Gründgens was moving
in celebrated artistic and literary circles. In 1926 he married
Erika Mann, the actress and daughter of author Thomas Mann, and
also enjoyed a close friendship with Erika's brother Klaus.
Biographies describe Gründgens in the twenties as leaning
to the left politically. A press release in 1926 declared that
Gründgens was planning a series of sketches at the Hamburg
theatre under the title “Revolutionary Theatre”. The
pieces were never in fact performed. In Mephisto Klaus
Mann describes how Gründgens (Hendrik Höfgen in the
book) was on friendly terms with Communist Party members who worked
in the theatre, always ready to exchange a clenched-fist welcome
on his way to rehearsals. At the same time Gründgens did
not hide his abhorrence for the Nazis.
But he also made no secret of his theatrical ambitions, above
all, to establish himself on the Berlin stage. His chance came
when Germany's most prominent director Max Reinhardt invited him
to come to Berlin and work for his company. Under Reinhardt's
direction Gründgens had his first opportunity to play the
role with which he was to become closely identified—Mephistopheles
in Goethe's Faust, premiered in 1932. In his novel, Klaus
Mann describes the political tensions of the time through the
eyes of two young men, one a fascist, the other a Communist:
“The day is approaching. That blazing conviction drives
Hans Miklas and Otto Ulrichs forward, consuming them and millions
of other young people. But for what day is Hendrik Höfgen
waiting? He never waits for anything but a new part. His great
role in the 1932-33 season is to be Mephisto.”
Gründgens was out of the country when the Nazis came to
power in early 1933. We have no way of knowing what went through
his head. We do know that he was apprehensive about returning
to Germany. He had not, after all, made his feelings about the
Nazis a secret and he was wise enough to know that he could also
encounter problems as someone, despite his short-lived marriage,
known to be a homosexual. In Mephisto, Mann, who knew Gründgens
very well (some say to the point of a sexual relationship), speculates
on Höfgen's deliberations about returning to Germany:
“He belonged to no party. And he wasn't a Jew, and so
everything could be forgiven him.... He was a blond Rhinelander.
“'I am a blond Rhinelander',” exulted Hendrik Höfgen,
revived by champagne and his optimistic reflections on the political
scene. It was in the best of spirits that he went to bed.”
Whether this characterisation is accurate or not, we know that
Gründgens returned to Germany under Hitler and flourished.
Goebbels was openly hostile to him, as he was to all homosexuals
(whom he referred to as 175ers according to the appropriate clause
of the Weimar Constitution), but Gründgens found a willing
patron in Prime Minister Goering, who had married an actress and
had his own artistic pretensions. The exodus by talented artists
after 1933 left many plum positions free and Gründgens' rise,
with Goering's help, was meteoric.
In 1934 he was appointed director of Berlin's most prestigious
theatre, the Berlin Staatstheater. The National Socialists realised
that such a position required an appropriate salary and in 1936
Gründgens sealed a deal securing an annual average income
of Reichsmark 200,000. He made a number of films in this period
(he turned down the offer of the lead role in Veit Harlan's Jud
Süss), earning on average RM80,000 per picture. In comparison
a state secretary in Nazi Germany earned on average RM20,000.
In 1934 Gründgens had moved into the luxurious villa owned
by a Jewish banker who had fled the country. The price paid for
the place was negotiated by Gründgens' lawyer, a member of
the Nazi SA.
Gründgens was a welcome guest at the parties and festivities
of prominent Nazi personalities and, thanks to Goering, he was
awarded his one audience with Hitler in 1936. There is evidence
to suggest that Gründgens was allowed a certain freedom in
terms of his choice of programme, but nevertheless the official
line of the party with regard to art and culture was stringent
and reactionary, perhaps best summed up by Goebbels: “The
German art of the next decade will be heroic, it will be steely-romantic,
it will be factual and completely free of sentimentality, it will
be national with great Pathos and committed, or it will be nothing.”
Gründgens' efforts to directly support the war effort
have been mentioned above. In June 1943 Gründgens underwent
army training in Holland and was posted to an air defence station
and then an airport near Amsterdam. In April 1944 Goering recalled
his cultural figurehead back to Berlin to take over once again
the affairs of the ailing Staatstheater. On September 1,1944 Goebbels
issued an order closing all German theatres until the end of the
war. All available artistic personal were assigned to vital war
production, for example, in the armaments factories. Gründgens
was allowed to sit out the rest of the war in his Berlin home.
Upon the fall of Berlin Gründgens was incarcerated in
a Russian prison camp. His rapid rehabilitation and re-entry into
German cultural life was secured by a commission in Chemnitz in
Soviet occupied Germany that restricted its investigation of Gründgens'
wartime role to the issue of whether he had fraudulently acquired
his villa in 1934. A decisive element in the commission's decision
to rehabilitate Gründgens was the intervention of the Soviet
Theatre Officer, Arssenyi Gulyga, who argued powerfully in his
favour. A condition for Gründgens' liberation was that he
use his theatre talents to promote theatre in the eastern Soviet-occupied
sector of Berlin.
In May 1946 Gründgens played his first role since the
end of the war as the “Snob” in the play of the same
name by playwright Carl Sternheim. In the same year he moved to
work in west Berlin and later took up leading roles at theatres
in Düsseldorf and Hamburg, establishing himself as the best
known actor-director in Germany. In 1960 Gründgens repaid
an old debt to Gulyga and Stalinist cultural circles with guest
performances in Moscow and Leningrad. Gründgens died in 1963
from an overdose of sleeping tablets while on holiday in Manila.
It is not an easy task today to assess the artistic talents
of Gründgens. He starred in many films in the 1930s (and
played a role in Fritz Lang's M) and 1940s, but commentators
maintain that he was never really able to recreate his stage virtuosity
on celluloid. He declared that his own favourite role was the
humanist prince, Hamlet, but no film version of his Hamlet exists.
In Mephisto Mann describes how Gründgens as director
of the Staatstheater was required to deform Shakespeare's Hamlet
into a digestible Teutonic alternative while Shakespeare himself
was transformed into our “great Germanic writer”.
Banned from performance were modern works by playwrights such
as Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, August Strindberg, Georg
Kaiser and Carl Sternheim.
There is a certain irony, which is perhaps no irony at all,
in the fact that Gründgens will always be remembered for
his role as Mephistopheles in Faust. Gründgens played
the role of the devil who tempts and destroys Faust in countless
productions and his performance is preserved on film in the classic
Hamburg theatre production of 1960. Anyone seeing the 1960 production
must concur that Gründgens excels in the part.
There is not the slightest evidence to suggest that Gründgens
was a committed Nazi. On the contrary any examination of his life
indicates that his ideological attachment to National Socialism
was just as precarious as his former association with the German
Communist Party. And although Gründgens never missed an opportunity
to surround himself with all the trappings of luxury, there were
a number of occasions in his life when he was required to pursue
his career under difficult living conditions. To reduce Gründgens'
career merely to pursuit of riches is inadequate. Most of his
contemporaries agree that his most outstanding personal characteristic
was his drive for recognition, scathingly summed up in Mephisto:
“Hendrik Höfgen—typecast as an elegant blackguard,
murderer in evening dress, scheming courtier—see nothing,
hear nothing. He has nothing to do with the city of Berlin. Nothing
but stages, film studio, dressing rooms, a few night-clubs, a
few fashionable drawing rooms are real to him. Does he not feel
the change in the seasons? Is he not aware that the years are
passing—the last years of that Weimar Republic born amid
so much hope and now so piteously expiring—the years 1930,1931,
1932? The actor Höfgen lives from one first night to the
next, from one film to another, his calendar composed of performances
days and rehearsal days. He scarcely notices that the snow melts,
that the trees and bushes are in bud or in full leaf, that there
are flowers and earth and streams. Encapsulated by his ambition
as in a prison cell, insatiable and tireless, always in a state
of extreme hysterical tension, Hendrik embraces a destiny that
seems to him exceptional but is in fact nothing but a vulgar arabesque
at the edge of an enterprise doomed to collapse.”
It is worth dwelling here on fate of Mann's book, which must
constitute one of the most notorious cultural scandals in the
history of post-war Germany. Mephisto was first published
when Mann was in exile in 1936; at this time he had already broken
with Gründgens. Mann declared that through his portrayal
of Höfgen/Gründgens he was attempting to depict the
capitulation of a whole social layer “My aim was not to tell
the story of a definite person, my intention was to present a
type and with it the various surrounding milieus ... the social
and spiritual requisites which makes possible his rise to prominence
in the first place.”
The book presented a devastating portrayal of the Nazi elite
and its supporters amongst the intelligentsia and was banned in
Germany by the Nazis as a matter of course. (In his diary entry
for May 11, 1933 Klaus Mann noted that all of his previous work
had been consigned to the flames in the Nazi book-burning campaign.)
The first German edition of Mephisto was published by the
East German Aufbau Verlag in 1956. In 1964 the Nymphenburg Publishing
House in Munich announced its plans to publish the book only to
be promptly confronted with a lawsuit initiated by Peter Gründgens-Gorski,
the post-war companion of Gründgens.
The judgement against the publishing of the book by the Oberland
Court of Hamburg included the following remarkable comment: “The
public is not interested in receiving a false picture of the theatre
after 1933 from the standpoint of an emigrant.” In other
words, Mann's flight from the Nazis disqualified him from commenting
on the situation in Germany! Better to stay at home and collaborate!
Mephisto was only finally published in West Germany in
1980.
There is another factor to account for the ease with which
Gründgens could accept the Nazis as his employer. In his
brief biography of Gründgens, Thomas Blubacker deals with
the former's conception of art and theatre: “Gründgens
understood theatre as a holy space which had to be shielded from
any influence from outside reality, so that theatrical art could
serve the eternal values of beauty and truth” (p. 92). This
brings to mind the comment by Leon Trotsky and André Breton
in their 1938 manifesto that “so-called ‘pure art' ...
generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction.”
This is surely the meeting place between Gründgens and
many of his supporters today who claim that “pure art”
or “pure theatre” is worth any compromise and even justifies
treachery on the part of the artist. Of course cultural and artistic
activity occupies its own independent sphere, it has its own laws
and rhythms of development. It cannot be reduced simply to the
immediate requirements of political and social development. But
art, and in particular theatre, is a profoundly social activity
and the artist ignores general social development at his own peril.
When Gründgens blocked out the social cataclysm taking
place all around him, when he closed his eyes to the book-burning,
he committed a grievous crime against art and culture in general.
He was able to intervene and ensure that a few colleagues and
friends, left-leaning or Jewish, were able to continue working.
But what was the final balance-sheet?
The persecution of artists in Germany had already commenced
before the National Socialists took over power. At the end of
1932 the 162 deputies of the Prussian state parliament passed
a bill demanding the sacking of all non-Reichsdeutsche (German)
theatre artists and banning performances of pieces with “pacifist
or morally destructive tendencies”. Max Reinhardt left Germany
on the March 8, 1933. Following the fascist take-over it is estimated
that 4,000 theatre artists in all quit Germany, including Oskar
Homulka, Peter Lorre, Carola Neher (who was to be murdered by
Stalin instead), Max Pallenburg and Conrad Veidt.
This figure of 4,000 does not include an estimated 1,500 writers
and dramatists such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, Ferdinand
Bruckner, Georg Kaiser and Carl Zuckmayer, who all went into exile.
Many others failed to escape the clutches of the Nazi SS, were
arrested, tortured and died (Carl von Ossietsky, Max Ehrlich,
Kurt Gerron, Fritz Grünbaum, Willy Rosen) in concentration
camps. Others were driven to suicide (Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin,
Stefan Zweig, Ernst Weiß, Walter Hasenclever and, after
the war in 1949, Klaus Mann himself ).
Gründgens was not directly responsible for their deaths,
but he did play a crucial role in according prestige to the regime
which was responsible. He collaborated with and assisted a monstrous,
murderous regime to which he lent his artistic and intellectual
credibility. He fully deserves his infamy.
A last word: it is impossible to separate the attempts to rehabilitate
Gründgens from the deliberate campaign taking place presently
in Germany to clear the decks with regard to the heritage of the
Nazi dictatorship. Earlier this year German soldiers undertook
their first foreign military intervention since the Second World
War—under the guise of preventing a new Holocaust. Recently
a concerted campaign in the press and media led to the closure
of an exhibition devoted to the crimes of the Wehrmacht (German
army). And only in the past week a disgraceful deal has been finalised
designed to a draw a veil over the collaboration between German
industry and the fascists.
It is worth quoting one short, remarkable paragraph justifying
the recent agreement on Nazi forced labour from an interview with
Stuart E. Eizenstat, one of the principal negotiators of the deal:
“I think we also recognise, as we go into the next century,
these kind of claims—I mean, not necessarily Holocaust-related,
but sort of mass actions—are going to increase, So what we're
doing will have some importance in terms of how other mass actions
will be treated” ( interview available on the Internet).
Imperialism and German imperialism anticipate new atrocities
in the coming century. Integral to Hitler's success, made possible
by the disastrous political line of the Communist Party, was the
compliance and spinelessness demonstrated by broad layers of the
German intelligentsia. This fundamental lesson of the twentieth
century should be borne in mind when reflecting on the career
of Gustav Gründgens.
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