Ernst Barlach

The Couple in Conversation, sheet 3 (top left)

Appearance in the Fog, sheet 24 (top right)

The Caller, sheet 22 (bottom left)

Call in the Fog, sheet 23 (bottom right)

 

Lithographs from the series The Dead Day

 

Ernst Barlach Haus – Stiftung Hermann F. Reemtsma, Hamburg

 

In December 1913, Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary:

“Read Barlach’s ‘Toten Tag’ (Dead Day) and was deeply moved by it. […] What grips me is the mother and her son. How he then wriggles free from her and calls for his father. And yet cannot reach God in all the fog. And returns to his mother’s side.”

In 1916, the artist also viewed the lithographs of Ernst Barlach (1870–1938) in an exhibition. Unlike with the drama Die echten Sedemunds, it is unclear whether she also attended the performance of the play at the Neues Volkstheater in 1923.

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Ernst Barlach

Encounter on the heights (top left)

Reception under a tent (top right)

Mountain forest with the ark (bottom left)

Noah and Calan (bottom right)

 

Illustrations for the drama “The Sin Flood”

 

1924

 

Charcoal drawings

 

Ernst Barlach Haus – Stiftung Hermann F. Reemtsma, Hamburg

 

In January 1939, Käthe Kollwitz reported that she had attended a gathering in honor of the deceased and ostracized Ernst Barlach (1870–1938): “The Flood was read. […] It made a huge impression.”

However, she had probably not seen the 1925 production of the play directed by Jürgen Fehling at the Prussian State Theater.

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Hermann Krehan after Robert Neppach

Stage/set design for “Die Wandlung” (The Transformation)

undated

(Production by Karlheinz Martin at Die Tribüne Berlin, 1919)

 

Gouache

 

Theater Studies Collection of the University of Cologne

 

On October 12, 1919, Käthe Kollwitz recalled in her diary that she had seen her son Peter for the last time on that day five years earlier, shortly before he was killed in World War I on the Western Front in Flanders. Against this backdrop, she was reluctant to attend the evening performance of Ernst Toller’s (1893–1939) play Die Wandlung (The Transformation) with her husband and son Hans.

The production of the play was a resounding success, also for the leading actor, the young Fritz Kortner (1892–1970), who would later marry Kollwitz’s niece Hanna—stage name Johanna Hofer. Another novelty was the innovative stage design, which dispensed with any spatial illusion.

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Hans Strohbach

Stage/set design for “Masse Mensch” (Mass Man)

1921

(Production by Jürgen Fehling at the Berliner Volksbühne, 1921)

 

Mixed media

 

Theater Studies Collection of the University of Cologne

 

Käthe Kollwitz saw this drama by Ernst Toller (1893–1939) on stage in February 1922, together with a relative, and then wrote about it in her diary:

“It moved me deeply. How he expresses everything that one has tossed and turned over in one’s mind to the point of torment. In the end: ‘One must sacrifice only oneself.’ / The tense, chained masses of workers, upon whom machine-gun fire is unleashed and who sing the Marseillaise, roar, rage—it’s enough to drive one mad.”

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Hans Strohbach

Stage/set design for “Masse Mensch” (Mass Man)

1921

(Production by Jürgen Fehling at the Berliner Volksbühne, 1921)

 

Mixed media

 

Theater Studies Collection of the University of Cologne

 

Käthe Kollwitz saw this drama by Ernst Toller (1893–1939) on stage in February 1922, together with a relative, and then wrote about it in her diary:

“It moved me deeply. How he expresses everything that one has tossed and turned over in one’s mind to the point of torment. In the end: ‘One must sacrifice only oneself.’ / The tense, chained masses of workers, upon whom machine-gun fire is unleashed and who sing the Marseillaise, roar, rage—it’s enough to drive one mad.”

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Fritz Erler

Design for “Hamlet” 1909

Mixed media

 

Theater Studies Collection of the University of Cologne

 

Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) staged William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) drama “Hamlet” in 1908 at the Künstler-Theater in Munich and in 1909 at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin.

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Virtues and shortcomings of the performance… The virtue lay in its greater simplicity. […] Now, in “Hamlet”… the core space remains virtually unfilled, but nowhere do secondary matters become the main focus.[…]

Hamlet, a conversation piece. In some places, quite rightly so. Twenty years after the founding of the Freie Bühne, people in their city certainly speak more naturally […]

The most serious flaw, in my opinion, lies in the lack of control over the individual parts. The line towards the end becomes wavering, dull. A great director, it seems to me, brings intensity; he brings a sense of the whole; here, it is piece by piece (and fading towards the end)… the second half is fleeting… I don’t notice any growth in what has been achieved… One sees a tasteful Hamlet drama. Much of it is neatly toned, attuned, appealing, refined, delicious. I don’t want to say: a charming Hamlet. But instead of mythical clouds, something well-defined. […]

Moissi (with all his charms) was not a creature obsessed with ultimate questions. […]

A touching little Hamlet, yes. […]  Alongside all the wonderful things. But we knew he had that. He was even charming … Except that he wasn’t that man in that play.

 

Alfred Kerr: Der Tag Nr. 245, 19.19.1909

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[…]The decorations were extremely simple, clearly modeled on those of the Munich Artists’ Theater, whose limited space he had to contend with. Only the snow-covered castle terrace, the tall forest of halberdiers’ spears, and perhaps Ophelia’s funeral procession, dark against the light sky, had something pictorially imaginative about them, despite the great simplicity of the stylization. The sketches of the castle chambers and galleries were characterized by a restraint that here and there went too far and turned into sobriety. […]

The highlight of the evening, a triumph for the actor Reinhardt himself, who, despite initial failures, unwaveringly challenged his talent—which had been marred by severe affectation—with ever new and greater tasks, was Moissi’s Hamlet. […]

He was a handsome prince, yet without the slightest hint of conventional theatrical idealization, marked by the finest intellectualism, amiable and gentle by nature, a deeply introspective man who, thrown off course by a terrible experience, fought in vain against his paralysis with shame and fear.

Conrad Schmidt: Vorwärts, 19.10.1909

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Fritz Erler
Design for Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Scenes I.1 and I.4, 1909

Oil on canvas

Theater Studies Collection of the University of Cologne

It is unclear when Käthe Kollwitz saw the production of Hamlet that Max Reinhardt staged at the Deutsches Theater in 1909. In a letter to her son Hans in 1912, she mentions in passing that she found the actor Alexander Moissi (1879-1935) particularly good in the role of Hamlet.

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Alexander Moissi

Monologue from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

Original recording from 1912

Deutsche Grammophon-Aktiengesellschaft

 

Saxon State Library – Dresden State and University Library

 

Listen to what Käthe Kollwitz heard on stage: Alexander Moissi (1879–1935) recites the famous Hamlet monologue from the third act about “to be or not to be.”

Scan the QR-Code on the object label.

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