Max Reinhardt (theatre director)
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Max Reinhardt (born September 9, 1873 in Baden bei Wien; died October 31, 1943 in New York City) was an influential Austrian director and actor. He was of Jewish ancestry, and his original name was Maximilian Goldmann.
From 1902 until the beginning of Nazi rule in 1933, he worked as a director at various theaters in Berlin. From 1905 to 1930 he managed the Deutsches Theater ("German Theatre") in Berlin and, in addition, the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna from 1924 to 1933. By employing powerful staging techniques and purposefully harmonising stage design, language, music and choreography, Reinhard introduced new dimensions into German theater.
Kurt Tucholsky, a poet of the Weimar era, described Reinhardt's spectacular production of Danton's Death, a nineteenth century warhorse that Reinhardt restaged in Berlin in the early 1920s, only a few years after the German Revolution of 1918-19:
DANTONS TOD
- Bei Reinhardt wogte der dritte Akt.
- Es rasten sechshundert Statisten.
- Sieh an - wie das die Berliner packt!
- Es jubeln die Journalisten.
- Mir aber erschien das Ganze wie
- eine kleine Allegorie.
- Es tost ein Volk: "Die Revolution!
- Wir wollen die Freiheit gewinnen!
- Wir wollten es seit Jahrhunderten schon -
- laßt Herzblut strömen und rinnen!"
- Es dröhnt die Szene. Es dröhnt das Haus.
- Um Neune ist alles aus.
- Und ernüchtert seh ich den grauen Tag.
- Wo ist der November geblieben?
- Wo ist das Volk, das einst unten lag,
- von Sehnsucht nach oben getrieben?
- Stille. Vorbei. Es war nicht viel.
- Ein Spiel. Ein Spiel.
DANTON'S DEATH
- Act Three was great in Reinhardt's play —
- Six hundred extras milling.
- Listen to what the critics say!
- All Berlin finds it thrilling.
- But in the whole affair I see
- A parable, if you ask me.
- "Revolution!' the People howls and cries
- 'Freedom, that's what we're needing!
- We've needed it for centuries —
- Our arteries are bleeding.'
- The stage is shaking. The audience rock.
- The whole thing is over by nine o'clock.
- The day looks grey as I come to.
- Where are the People — remember? —
- That stormed the peaks from down below?
- What happened to November?
- Silence. All gone. Just that, in fact.
- An act. An act.
The Max-Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna, which is arguably the most important German-language acting school, was installed implementing his ideas.
In 1920, Reinhardt established the Salzburg Festival with Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi-governed Germany in 1938, he emigrated first to England, then to the United States, where he had already successfully directed a popular stage version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, using Jimmy Cagney, Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown and other stars of Hollywood. Reinhardt followed that success by directing a film version using the same cast in 1935. The Nazis banned the film because of the Jewish ancestry of both Reinhardt and Felix Mendelssohn, whose overture was used throughout the film.
In 1940 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. At that time, he was married to his second wife, the actress Helene Thimig.
His son, Gottfried Reinhardt, was a well-regarded film produceer in his own right. His grandson, Stephen Reinhardt, is a labor lawyer who has been one of the most liberal judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since his appointment by Jimmy Carter in 1980.de:Max Reinhardt