Von Niederschönenfeld nach Berlin

Abstract

AbstractUntil 1933, highly renowned theatre critics of Jewish descent were dominant in the feuilletons of Berlin’s leading regional papers. In 1919, Ernst Toller, also of Jewish descent and, a year earlier, a member of the short-lived revolutionary regime in Munich, established his fame as a playwright. While serving a five year prison sentence, and until 1927, he contributed five plays to the German expressionist and post-expressionist drama, with four out of five first-night performances at the prominent Berlin stages of Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner. The article addresses reviews of these performances by critics such as Emil Faktor, Siegfried Jacobsohn and Alfred Kerr, asking among other questions, whether and how these critics present a viewpoint that can be seen as »Jewish« in terms of how intellectuals belonging to the Jewish minority were viewed in the Weimar Republic.