In 1910, Käthe Kollwitz was an enthusiastic witness to the sensational premiere of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” at the Schumann Circus. Impressed, she wrote in her diary:
“The Oedipus performance on November 7. Absolutely magnificent, absolutely tremendous. Even if it wasn’t Sophoclean and not ancient, even if it was circus style (‘King Oedipus in Karlshorst’) – it was still new, exciting, colossal in its dimensions, tragic in its effect. The people, after hearing the news of Jocasta’s death, were thrown back and forth at the palace like roaring surf. The maelstrom. Then, when the blinded Oedipus appears, the sighing cry with which the people recoil back out of the arena. Oedipus, when he spoke to the chorus from his lofty height, just as he saw the chorus only as a dim mass, seemed to hear it, only indistinctly, only half-willingly, with the annoyingly impatient expression of a man who hears what he does not like. Then his cries as he comes out of the palace, his stunned lament. Jocasta with her blood-red mouth, stretching out both arms horizontally, seeing the inevitable. / And finally, the applause, worthy of such a performance. / It lifted me up for days.”