Theater in the Planned Society

Front matter

UNC STUDIES IN THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Theater in the Planned Society

Contemporary Drama in the German Democratic Republic in its Historical, Political, and Cultural Context

Contents

Preface xi Acknowledgments xiv Addendum to the Preface XV Introduction: Theater in Flux, 1945-1949 I I. Veterans Into the Breach: Grünberg, Wolf and Wangenheim 10

II. The Emergence of the Socialist Perspective: 1951-1956 25 HI. Toward a Socialist National Theater 50 IV. The Dialectic Digression 59 V. Brown Coal Dialectics 71 VI. In Search of the Mainstream 85 VII. Collective Bucolics 94 VIII. The Bourgeois Aesthetic: Up Against the Wall 112 IX. Heavy Traffic on the Party Line: The Plays of 1963-1964 123 X. Ruminations and Rejections: The Eleventh Plenary Inquisition 132 XI. The Contemporary Topical Drama 141 Bibliography 155

Index 162

Preface

The American reader’s exposure to the literature of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), generally known as East Germany, has been minimal. In the area of German studies, however, the study of the culture of the GDR has been the fastest-growing discipline at American universities in recent years.

Today in the United States, public recognition of the GDR is at an all-time high. Since 1969 the attention given to the “other” German state by government agencies, the media, and educational institutions has steadily increased. This achievement of a new “higher profile” in the public mind is partly due to the GDR’s recent efforts to improve its international public relations and to relax cold war tensions. But the primary credit for this new focus must be placed where it rightfully belongs: with historical necessity.

For twenty years the GDR was deliberately ignored in sources of public information in the vain hope that it would indeed go away if ignored long enough. By 1969, however, the GDR could no longer be ignored. Economically it had come to rank among the top ten industrial nations of the world: it was the second largest industrial producer of the Warsaw Pact nations. As such, it had forced other nations to recognize its growing importance in international relations: it had become a potential trade partner. These developments culminated in the GDR’s admission to the United Nations in 1973 with status equal to that of the other new member, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and, finally, in the formal diplomatic recognition of the GDR by the United States in the fall of 1974.

Americans who are interested in the cultural life of the GDR must first be prepared to dismiss those preconceived notions of “German Culture” which are usually gained through exposure to German history or to the cultural life of the Western, Americanized Federal Republic.

The GDR, geographically “Middle” rather than “Eastern” Germany, is a “socialist democracy,” i.e., a socialist state based upon a governing communist xi party. In its simplest definition, the GDR is indeed a Communist country. GDR cultural life thus follows a set of rules that do not correspond to the more familiar patterns of West Germany or the United States.

Like all Communist states, the GDR is a centrally planned society. Consequently, its literature is a planned literature. This is nowhere more evident than in the production of drama. Socialist realism, the “historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development,” confines the East German theater to the topical representation of contemporary life in the German Democratic Republic. The Socialist Unity Party (SED) envisions the theater, traditionally Germany’s ‘‘moral institution,” as a vehicle for the transmission of a socialist morality. The SED’s cultural policy places the contemporary topical drama of the GDR in the vanguard of cultural-political activity; it is at once one of the prime educational tools of the planned society and its most effectively planned literary genre. This politicization of the theater makes the dramatist a political figure, and his work a political phenomenon. A primary task of the present volume is to investigate the strategies used by various dramatists to respond to this social mandate and the way in which their imposed social role affects the nature and quality of their work.

To the liberal West the social-political mandate under which the GDR dramatists must work represents the most fascinating aspect of their literary situation. This study attempts to examine the development of contemporary GDR dramatists and their theater within the framework of the GDR’s socialist/ Communist system and to trace the reciprocal relationships between the dramatists and their planned society. We could do worse than to take our own drama and dramatists as seriously as the GDR regards hers.

Given these circumstances, a note on the methodology of this study will be of benefit to the reader. The present study has two major objectives: (1) To trace the development of the GDR’s contemporary topical drama (GDR drama about the GDR) in its historical context; and (2) to define the sociopolitical function of drama and dramatists in that society. These objectives necessitate an historical approach which I have tried to apply as objectively and consistently as possible. From the very beginning, it was evident to me that to separate politics from literature, art from society, and history from literary history would not only be a thankless endeavor, but a fruitless one as well. I am convinced that the literary artist, and especially the writer of drama, engages in a social function in any society. In the GDR, this function is raised to another degree, to a political function. Necessarily, this implies certain controls and restrictions to which the dramatist must tailor his work, since the primary function of the dramatist’s work is not defined by the dramatist, but by the cultural policy of the state which fluctuates with the historical development of the GDR.

Here, the all-important questions of artistic freedom and aesthetic quality become unavoidable. To do full justice to these questions, however, would entail

Xii an incisive ideological critique of the sociopolitical structure of the GDR which I do not presume to present in my historically oriented study of contemporary drama. Furthermore, I am not convinced that “artistic freedom” and “aesthetic quality” are causally related —however these concepts may be defined. Existing definitions of these concepts do not significantly rise above justifications of subjective personal taste tied to personal ideology. In my own subjective taste, I may value the drama of Heiner Miiller far above that of Helmut Sakowski. This however only defines my taste as an American middle-class scholar, but says little indeed about the historical function of the theater in the GDR which is my primary object of inquiry.

For those who wish to pursue this question further, within the framework of this study or outside of it, I have carefully and objectively outlined the ideological consistencies and inconsistencies in the cultural policy of the GDR to the extent that available historical evidence permits. Thus the reader may make his own aesthetic and ideological judgments in reference to the cultural-historical processes, the dramatists, and the works encompassed in the present study.

* * *

A word about the terminology, abbreviations, and translations used: I have studiously tried to avoid the acronym game to which the GDR’s bureaucratic jungle lends itself too readily. For obvious convenience, I use only two abbreviations, the English GDR for German Democratic Republic, and the German SED for Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany). Although this seems inconsistent, it reflects accepted use in the literature. All other organizations are referred to in their non-abbreviated English-translations, again as they are being standardized in the literature: i.e., Free German Youth for Freie Deutsche Jugend, etc. Periodicals are referred to in full and cited with their original title. All quoted passages from German sources, both in the text and annotations, have been translated by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Xill

Acknowledgments

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the following people and organizations without whom this project could not have been realized: In Madison, Wisconsin, I thank Wigand Lange, Reinhold Grimm, David Bathrick, and Elisabeth Hermand for their criticism and support. In West Germany and West Berlin, I thank Heinar Kipphardt, Walther Dieckmann, Hans Mayer, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch for their time and information. In the GDR, I thank Heiner Müller, Paul Kanut Schafer, Karl Mundstock, Paul Herbert Freyer, and Fritz Marquardt for helping me accomplish an almost impossible task in 1971 and 1972. Also in the GDR I received valuable assistance from the staff of the Deutsches Theater, the Henschelverlag, and the Heinrich Heine Buchhandlung.

A special note of gratitude must be given to Jost Hermand, whose critical guidance and support I have enjoyed throughout the various stages of this project. Finally, I am greatly indebted to my former associate Susan Huettich who worked with me from the beginning, but not to the end, and to Judith Ann Jensen and James Orville Smith for their help in revising the final manuscript.

Santa Monica, California H. G. Huettich December 1975

Xiv

Addendum to the Preface

In the last chapter of this study I suggest a hopeful prognosis for the progressive development of significant German drama indigenous to the GDR, albeit “barring any radical shift” in the highly productive liberal cultural policies of the “Honecker era.” This view was based on the evidence of open dialogue between the SED’s leading theoreticians and dissenting writers who considered, respected, and above all listened to each other in their common quest for the continued qualitative improvement of the GDR’s literary production. This peace, however, was not a lasting one. It is depressing to me—as it is to all those involved in the critical study of the GDR, its society and its culture—that my tentative assessment of the future has proven to be illusory during the last few months. It is evident that those of us who have studied GDR literature and cultural policy for many years should have by now learned never to trust any cultural-political peace in that country for too long. Once more, the shift in policy toward a rigid neo-Stalinist line is based on the Soviet model. When Marxist dissenters are expatriated involuntarily, when Marxist intellectuals are threatened in the pursuit of their livelihood, when Marxist authors are rousted in the streets—as has been the case recently with any number of writers treated in this study—then the future of that ostensibly “great Marxist experiment on German soil” is greatly endangered. Let us hope that the dramas resulting from this new policy will be played in the theaters—and not as tragedies in the streets or in the prisons and the asylums.

XV

Introduction: Theater in Flux, 1945-1949

1. POLITICS AND LITERATURE

History officially begins for the German Democratic Republic on 7 October 1949, when a new People’s Parliament and a new constitution took over the affairs of state from the Soviet Military Administration. But the prehistory of that state, the years between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the date of obtained sovereignty, cannot be divorced from the historical process. In a span of twenty-nine years, this process has brought one-third of a totally devastated nation from utter economic and cultural prostration to an economic and cultural position within the alliance of Eastern European socialist states second only to that of the Soviet Union. The history of the theater in the German Democratic Republic is an integral part of this cultural, economic and political development. An objective study of East Germany’s dramatic literature must necessarily strive for a historical perspective if it is to be fully understood.

In Theater Bilanz, an excellent, all-encompassing survey of GDR theater compiled in 1971 under the auspices of the Society of Theater Workers of the GDR, the history of East German theater is viewed as a historically homogeneous and continuous phenomenon:

The continuity of development of GDR theater is evident in the stages of its manifestation: in building the base for an antifascist, democratic theater (1945-49), in the development of the humanistic people’s theater in the new state (1949-55), in the creation of the premises for a socialist national theater of the GDR (1956-62), and in the maturing period of the theater arts in the developed, i.e., fully achieved, socialist society of the GDR.!

! Manfred Nössig and Hans Gerald Otto, “Grundlagen einer Bilanz,” in Theater Bilanz: Bühnen der DDR: Eine Bilddokumentation 1945-1969, ed. Christoph Funke et al. (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1971), p- 9. (This and all further quotations from German sources have becn translated by the author unless otherwise indicated.)

The authors of the survey go on to quote Walter Ulbricht, First Secretary of the ruling SED from 1949 to 1971, and thus the GDR’s most powerful political leader, who stated in 1969: “Our conception, even at that time [1945-49], contained the idea of the socialist national culture of the GDR.’’2

Insofar as Ulbricht’s statement reflects official hindsight, it cannot be accepted without considerable reservation. An epoch of theater history has been categorized and incorporated into a historical perspective based upon the current cultural policy. In the German Democratic Republic, as in other Communist societies, theater history is regarded as nothing more than history, and history is always interpreted in accordance with the current requirements of power. Cultural policy in such a socialist society is perhaps one of the most important facets of domestic policy. It is a very serious—at times deadly —issue, and it must be viewed as such. One of the basic premises of the German Democratic Republic is the assumption that its artistic production must be viewed and treated as a socially formative force.

The responsible scholar must assume that the cultural functionaries of planned societies will habitually attempt to make previous history consistent with the current point of view. In 1969, the “socialist national culture” had become a reality in the German Democratic Republic: a socialist perspective in the arts supported national objectives in both the domestic and the foreign spheres. To say that it was planned that way from the beginning, to say that the “prehistorical’ epoch 1945-49 formed the basis for a homogeneous, continuous development toward a socialist national culture, is at the very best an attempt to conceal objective historical conflicts under a cloak of nonhistorical rationalization.

The direct influence of history cannot be denied. During the early period prior to 1949 political development in the Soviet Occupation Zone was entirely subject to economic contingencies. For the Soviet Military Administration, economic contingencies meant first, reparations, and second, the channelling of economic output toward Moscow. The concept of a divided Germany, and thus any conception of the future in terms of “‘socialist national’’ evolution, had not yet entered into the reckoning because the formation of a separate Communist state had not yet been postulated. For the first two years, 1945-47, the Soviet Military Administration did not have a clear, centralized conception of the future role of the Soviet Occupation Zone or, for that matter, of the rest of Germany. Although it is certain that the Soviet Military Administration informed Ulbricht and other reimported German Communists of its intentions, the fact that these intentions were somewhat contradictory and disorganized made planning difficult. The lack of clear direction on the part of the Soviet Military Administration was obvious in its contradictory actions: dismantling some factories while urging production in others; stripping the railroad system while insisting on improved transport capabilities; and organizing a labor force for the Soviet

2 Ibid.

Occupation Zone while deporting a large number of skilled German workers and technicians to Russia. The role of the German Communists at that time must have been extremely frustrating, since their lack of decision-making power and the administrative chaos surrounding them precluded effective planning on their part.

Official planning was out of their hands in any case—as were all other matters of Realpolitik—until much later. While in 1945 German civilians were quickly given the responsibility of administering a new democratic order of civil law in the Soviet Occupation Zone, they had no such authority in economic and political planning. Until 1948, there was no single coordinated plan for the Soviet Zone. Plans by the Soviets, plans by the Germans, and all of the various provincial plans were drawn up independently of each other, and the execution of the Soviet plan took precedence over all of the others.?

From this perspective, the developments at the German Writers’ Conference of 1947 are not surprising. While the “socialist national culture” of the future GDR was supposedly being conceived—a conception presupposing a permanently divided Germany— Marxist critic Alexander Abusch, one of the most important exponents of GDR cultural policy, had a different prognosis. He saw the two streams of German literature since 1933, that of the “emigration” (writers exiled during the Third Reich) and that of the “inner emigration” (writers who remained in Germany), as a basis for a common German literature of the future.* A united Germany was certainly a part of most people’s conception of the future at that time, and the cultural functionaries of the Soviet Occupation Zone had no reason to think otherwise.

These functionaries were merely trying to maintain an “anti-fascist democratic order.” This mission was taken very seriously by all levels of power from the Soviet Military Administration on downward. There is some indication that cultural activity in the Zone was not proceeding to the liking of the German Communists, who had hoped to immediately emulate the Communist model of the Soviet Union. The political establishment of the principles of democratic civil law proceeded quickly enough; but a tendency toward “bourgeois” aesthetic ideals persisted. Political engagement in literary activity was still the exception rather than the rule. This made the situation in 1946-47 somewhat like the “total suspicion of ideology” prevalent in West German society and literature of the time.° This suspicion rested, of course, on the horrible experiences of the Hitler era, experiences which had led to a sense that all contacts between politics and the

3 Cf. Joseph P. Nettl, The Eastern Zone and Soviet Policy in Germany 1945-50 (London: Oxford, 1951), p. 65.

4 Cf. Frank Trommler, “Der zögernde Nachwuchs: Entwicklungsprobleme der Nachkriegsliteratur in West und Ost,” in Tendenzen der deutschen Literatur seit 1945, ed. Thomas Koebner (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1971), p. 28.

5 Cf. Hans Mayer, Deutsche Literatur seit Thomas Mann (Reinbek bei Hamburg: rororo, 1968), p. 53.

arts must necessarily result in the distortion of both.

Friedrich Wolf, a leading prewar Communist, revolutionary, and playwright who had spent the war exiled in Russia, expressed the frustration of the German Communists in his own personal way: “But writing plays—forget it!! Too bad!!!’® This is what Wolf, actually the leading dramatist of Germany’s organized left wing since the twenties, wrote to Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the renowned Sovict dramatist, on 10 September 1946. Before Wolf expressed this obviously painful sentiment, he pointed out the missed opportunities for a socialist drama in that period. Wolf saw that both older and newer political plays with prosocialist or anti-fascist content—his own included—were being relegated to the “third and fourth position”? in favor of “plays of Anglo-French snobbism,’’® such as those by Jean Anouilh and Thornton Wilder which were currently in vogue even on the stages of the Soviet Zone. Wolf was naturally disappointed. As an emigrant returned from exile in Russia, he had hoped for the establishment of a more immediately historical drama, a drama linked to the reality of the postwar situation and analogous to the contemporary Soviet theater of that time.

Wolf further noted that there were indeed good “anti-fascist”’ plays (those, for example, by Herbert Lommer and Hedda Zinner, both Communists of Wolf’s mold), but that they were not staged often enough. The argument producers used against them was that it was too early to write clearly and analytically about the recent past. Wolf’s complaint was that the entire German theatrical scene (inclusive of the Soviet Zone) was in the clutches of an analytical and symbolistic nihilism designed to show that the human situation is hopeless and that there is nothing man can do to alter his fate. He believed he saw this not only in the theater, but also in criticism: ‘We used to have progressive criticism! Today, however, even the ‘critics’ in our Zone are silent in the face of the unbridled snobbism which furthers symbolistic Part pour l’art plays.’’? Here, indeed, Wolf may be venting the rancor of the neglected artist, but the central point of his protest remained the lack of a consistent cultural policy of the sort he had observed in the Soviet Union. As a Communist Party member, he was committed to the idea that a society must have a cultural program that imposes upon the arts a moral and social didactic role in conformity with the Communist view of history. He saw that the basic theses of the new society he envisioned were slow in manifesting themselves in the realm of German theater.

Wolf expressed understandable concern that in this cultural battle between

6 Friedrich Wolf] Wsewolod Wischnewski: Eine Auswahl aus ihrem Briefwechsel, ed. Gudrun Düwel (Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Künste, 1965), p. $8.

9 Ibid.

Communist and capitalist ideals the most important early years could be lost to the American administration and the conservative cultural traditions of Western Europe. Wolf quoted producers who would have staged good Soviet plays, but who had only “six to eight badly translated and miserably reproduced’’!0 Russian dramas available to them. In contrast, he noted that the American administration provided “thirty-eight good new American plays, well translated and well printed.’’!!

Wolf’s letter contradicts the generally held but historically uncritical conception of the actualities of literary production in the first years of today’s German Democratic Republic—at least in terms of the drama. Today we are generally led to believe that from the beginning everything went smoothly and according to plan. But the influence of Soviet cultural policy and the incorporation of socialist plays into the repertoire were not immediate, and were by no means considered inevitable. The Americans quickly and incisively comprehended the cultural situation, and thus the first round in the cultural battle for the minds of the “poets and thinkers” went to the Cold Warriors of the West. They had, at least, won the race to provide “good,” i.e., playable, texts to producers in sufficient quantities.

On another level, the Soviet Military Administration was quite generous: it licensed no fewer than seventy-five institutions in the Soviet Zone where plays were produced in the first postwar season (1945-46).!2 Theaters even appeared in cities and towns where there had never been any. This rather liberal cultural policy of the Soviet victors remained, for the time being, without the progressive, goal-oriented tendencies which might have been expected. There was, for example, no explicit pressure to give Russian or German socialist drama preferred treatment in the repertoire; censorship restricted only Nazi and militaristic tendencies and was therefore not obviously different from the censorship practiced in the Allied Occupation Zones and West Berlin. The reason for the Soviets’ leniency is simple and historically demonstrable. The future role of the Soviet Occupation Zone had not yet become clear to the Soviet Military Administration. The deliberate change of repertoire in favor of socialist plays during the following years corresponds directly to the breakdown of communications between the Soviet Military Administration and its Allied counterparts over the reunification question and the growing Berlin crisis.

The “socialist national culture” that has developed in the GDR is quite different from anything known in the rest of Europe. It is certainly not the result of the quest for an ideal, but is, instead, the cultural reflection of political action

11 Ibid.

12 Cf. Heinz Kersten, “Theater und Theaterpolitik in der DDR,” in Theater hinter dem “Eisernen Vorhang.” ed. Reinhold Grimm ct al. (Hamburg: Basilius, 1964), pp. 14-57.

determined by a historical situation. There was, however, a distinct time lag between political developments and their cultural repercussions in the theater. The 1947-48 season of the postwar theater was by far the most important in terms of political events. During this third season, the power play strategies of East and West became more acute with each new development, finally climaxing with the concrete political separation of the two Germanies. The main strategies at this stage of the Cold War were the currency reforms in both East and West Germany, the takeover of Eastern economic planning by Ulbricht and the SED!3 in 1948, the Berlin Blockade by the Soviets, and the outlawing of the Communist Party in the West. Thus the formation of the German Democratic Republic as a sovereign state on 7 October 1949 was at least partly due to the deterioration of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The series of determinant actions during those years began on 6 June 1947, when the East German Provincial Ministers walked out of the Conference of German Ministers in Munich. This rejection of the West was followed in the Soviet Occupation Zone on 30 June by the formation of the Society for the Study of the Culture of the Soviet Union. On 23 July, the SED further rejected the West by refusing to participate in the Marshall Plan. In response, the American administration banned the activities of the Cultural League for the Democratic Regeneration of Germany (Kulturbund) in the American Sector of Berlin because of its obvious Communist tendencies. This was followed by similar edicts in the British and French Sectors. The already tense situation deteriorated rapidly as the Fourth Four-Power Conference of Foreign Ministers in London closed without results on the pressing questions of German reunification and the growing Berlin crisis. After the Soviet representative, Marshall Sokolovsky, walked out on the Control Commission, rendering it useless, on 28 March 1948, it was only a small step to the start of the Berlin Blockade on 24 June 1948.

2. THE STATE OF THE THEATER

The history of socialist drama in the German Democratic Republic starts in the immediate postwar years, but in its early stages it is not as extensive as one might suppose. After the Deutsches Theater reopened on 7 September 1945 with Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, a humanist drama from the height of eighteenthcentury German Enlightenment, Gustav von Wangenheim produced a Soviet play, Rakhmanov’s Restless Old Age. The following season brought a little more “socialist realism,” which is now generally defined as the uniform literary theory of the socialist/Communist countries. Its tenets were first set forth by Maxim

13 The SED resulted from the East German fusion of the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, effective 20 January 1946. Its control was exercised by members of the former Communist Party, and today, although other parties do exist, it is the party in the GDR.

Gorki and adopted by the First Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934. “Socialist realism” was supposedly the historical extension of the “critical realism” that characterized the socially critical literature developed by nineteenth-century liberals. The chief difference between the two resulted from the belief that since the adverse prerevolutionary social-political conditions had been rectified in Russia by 1934, contemporary Russian society was not open to criticism. Thus socialist realism began to confine itself to the “positive” literary portrayal of Communist societies. This consistently affirmative form of socialist realism has been, and continues to be, the basis of official cultural policy in Communist states, including, of course, the GDR.

During the second postwar season, Konstantin Simonov’s The Russian Question and Evgeny Zhvarts’s Shadows were produced at the Deutsches Theater. The fact that Shadows was produced by Gustav Griindgens is in itself an indication of how liberal the climate was, since Griindgens had been one of the more successful actors in the Third Reich. In addition, Alexey Arbuzov’s romantically somewhat disjointed but nevertheless socialistically developmental Tanya played the Landestheater Dessau, while Boris Lavrenyov’s revolutionary drama The Breach was produced at the Dresdener Volksbiihne. The Breach shows not only proletarians but also some levels of the bourgeoisie caught up in agitation for the revolution—appropriate fare for the political education of the predominantly bourgeois Germans in the Soviet Zone. The great theatrical success of 1948, however, took place in the House of Culture of the Soviet Union, which was later to become the Maxim Gorki Theater: there, the Deutsches Theater staged Friedrich Wolf’s translation of Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s Optimistic Tragedy. The impact of these relatively few Soviet plays was considerably amplified, since successful performances in Berlin were naturally followed by similar productions in the “provinces.” Until the noticeable alteration of policy in 1950, the repertoire of the German Democratic Republic had a distinctly cosmopolitan flavor; the 1949 season featured works by Maxim Gorki— The False Money at the National Theater of Weimar, and Vassa Zheleznova at Brecht’s brand new Berliner Ensemble. Meanwhile, the newly established Maxim Gorki Theater, under the freshly replanted linden trees of Berlin’s main street, presented socialist realism in the form of Anatoly Sofronov’s Lyubov Yarovaya and Konstantin Trenyov’s Moscow Character.

A short look at Berlin will serve to illustrate the situation of German theater at that time. Before the blockade, Berlin was the legendary “open city” of cold war and international intrigue—but also of culture. In terms of the theater, this meant that all theatrical activities, East and West, were attended and reviewed by audiences and critics from both sides. This mutual accessibility had the makings of a bona fide cultural class struggle. Since actors and critics depend on good reviews for their livelihood, success, in this context of the budding social systems of East and West Germany, was in part a good review, or simple appreciation, by the opposition.'4 It is easy, then, to understand Friedrich Wolf’s lament. He realized quickly and correctly that some directors and producers working in East Berlin had as their objective not the socialist cause, but rather applause from West Berlin.

Up to this time, Berlin had been the theater center of Germany. A great number of actors and other theater workers had settled there to work in the liberal cultural climate that still prevailed. Berlin’s fleeting but unique status as an “open city” allowed them to live and work in all of the Sectors without much restriction. But the Soviet Sector was without a doubt the theatrical place to be since most of the best theaters were located there and enjoyed the financial support of the administration. Thus, until the 1949-50 season, when the climate of the theater was altered by the formation of the GDR, an explicit internationalism dominated the theater arts of the Soviet Zone.