Castle finds its portcullis

When Viennese speak of ‘the castle’ (die Burg) they don’t mean Kafka’s nightmare construction, but their National Theatre. The tradition-encrusted Burgtheater was held in such esteem in German-speaking lands that Burgtheaterdeutsch ranked as the equivalent of Oxford English. In the manner of continental dynasties the Habsburgs lavished subsidies on the theatre while entangling it in interference and bureaucracy. Gustav Mahler’s problems at the Court Opera were paralleled by those of his colleagues at the Burgtheater. By the 1920s Vienna no longer shone as brightly on the theatrical firmament as Berlin – except for the fact that Max Reinhardt divided his time between the two capitals. However, neither he nor directorial assistants Otto Preminger and Ernst Lothar ever stepped through the hallowed portals of the Burgtheater. But one didn’t have to be Jewish to encounter problems with the Burgtheater whose founder, incidentally, had been the converted Jew Josef von Sonnenfels, advisor to Emperor Josef II). Anton WiIdgans, the only playwright of distinction ever to head the institution, experienced such difficulties that the directorship almost certainly shortened his life. None of this significantly impaired the Austrians’ esteem for their National theatre. In the mid-Thirties they even made a film entitled Burgtheater. This slice of ripe ham featured Werner Kraus who fifteen years earlier had reputedly given the fledgling rabble-rouser Hitler elocution lessons) and Paula Wessely, a Reinhardt discovery whom the starstruck Viennese had elevated into a latterday Duse. At the time cultural life was envenomed by politics. After the Nazi takeover in Germany the conductor Clemens Krauss led a minor exodus from the Staatsoper to Berlin, and soon after Stefan Zweig moved from Salzburg to London for diametrically opposite reasons. At the Burgtheater the semi-resident playwright Max Mell swung like a weathervane: having earlier on turned out edifying Catholic dramas with titles like Das Apostelspiel (the Play of the Apostles), he now confected Das Spiel von den Deutschen Ahnen (the Play of the German Ancestors). On the day of the Anschluss the nazification of the Burgtheater was instantly carried out by actor Fred Hennings, whose duelling scars had long lent verisimilitude to his portrayal of stage villains. That night Nazi thugs tortured and murdered the Jewish director of the Scala Theatre, Rudolf Beer. During the following days, Paula Wessely issued a statement denouncing Max Reinhardt to whom she owed her career, her actor colleague Egon Friedell threw himself off the top of a tall building, the playwright Jura Soyfer was caught trying to cross to Switzerland, and the comic Fritz Griinbaum was dragged off to Dachau. Very soon Austria’s non-Jewish intellectual elite was geographically dispersed, with the physicist Erwin Schrodinger in Dublin, the painter Oskar Kokoschka in London, the writer Franz Theodor Czokor in Belgrade and the playwright Odon von Horvath in Paris. But a large number of others – exemplified by the zoologist Konrad Lorenz, the composer Anton Webern, the conductor Karl Bohm and the author Heimito von Doderer – not only stayed put, but positively welcomed the new dispensation. Some intellectual Nazi support continued to the bitter end. Feeling they could not live in a world bereft of the Fuhrer, both the poet Josef Weinheber and the painter Carl Moll (Alma Mahler’s stepfather) committed suicide in May 1945. Impoverished postwar Austrian culture received ample Jewish blood transfusion. Schnitzler was performed at the Burgtheater and Hofmannsthal in Salzburg; Bernstein and Maazel conducted at the Staatsoper. For all that, the Nazi poison kept festering in the national consciousness. No-one saw this more clearly than (the non-Jew) Thomas Bernhard, who put a posthumous ban on the performance of his plays in Austria. It is a pity that Bernhard didn’t live long enough to see the antibodies created by the lingering Nazi poison at work. In early February the Burgtheater hosted a rally at which contemporary cultural icons – the actor Karl Maria Brandauer, the playwright Elfride Jellinek, the essayist Robert Menasse – mobilised a new generation of students and intellectuals to tame Brecht’s ‘bitch that’s still on heat’.