Claus Peymann, the theater director and artistic director for decades of European temples such as the Burgtheater of Vienna and the Berliner Ensemble, has died on Wednesday at age 88 at his Berlin home in Köpenick after a long illness. When the legend becomes a fact, said a character of John Ford, prints the legend. Peymann, a more subversive, agitator and marginal director than John Ford, never hesitated: he chose military in the truth. He surrounded himself with contemporary authors such as Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Peter Turrini and Thomas Bernhard to shake the dust of the great theatrical curtains and tell what they saw, what nobody wanted to see.
Bernhard was commissioned by a work to commemorate the centenary of the Burgtheater, which coincided with the fifty anniversary of the Connection (Austria’s annexation to the third Reich), and the result was a discharge of manure at the gates of the National Theater of Austria, death threats for the writer and the director, and 32 minutes of applause in the plate. The work Heroic (Heroes Square) He portrayed a republic with more Nazis than in 1938 at one time, 1988, in which the thesis was still paid that the country had been Hitler’s first victim and historical responsibility was not officially discussed. “The resistance emanating from Burgtheater contributed to the feeling that there was a theater that began to clean all the filth of the Republic,” he said in an interview in The standard In 2018.
As a good artist – and like everyone else – it was a contradictory figure. Berenked with the left and the May 68 movement, he had homeric broncas with the workers of his theater companies, accused of tyrant and mouthwood. He said: “I am a fang in the ass of the powerful”, but yesterday the federal president of Austria, Alexander van der Bellen (the great magician of the theater is dead “), and the Minister of Culture, Andreas Babler (” He said without fear a mirror against Austria. His legacy is an example of the democratic force of art “).
Stefan Bachmann, current artistic director of the Burgtheater, said: “Claus Peymann was one of the greats. He played a decisive role in the formation of the theater for decades. His career as an artistic director, from Stuttgart to Bochum, the Burgtheater, of course, and the Berliner Ensemble, is legendary. Perhaps his most important achievement was the promotion of contemporary authors Handke, Jelinek and, of course, Bernhard.
Born in Bremen in 1937, his father, in his words, “was Nazi, Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel), teacher by profession, one of the typical Nazis with good character.” His mother was an anti -fascist who was arrested when he knew for the London BBC of the attack against Hitler on July 20, 1944 and shouted out the window “The pig is dead!” “So in terms of principles I was quite divided,” Peymann added in a controversial interview for The time in 1988. We knew there were fields where Jews were killed. We received Auschwitz soap. In spite of everything, we expected the victory. ”
He began his career in Hamburg, Stuttgart and Frankfurt. He highlighted as director of Theater AM Turm in Frankfurt with the premiere of Insults to the public of handke. From 1974 to 1979 he directed the Stuttgart Staatstheater, where he signed his departure heading to Schauspielhaus de Bochum after the representation of Thomas Bernhard’s drama Before retirement (1979), who explored the past as Judge of the Hitler Marina of Hans Filbinger, the conservative president of the Federated State of Baden-Wurtemberg, and denounced the collaboration of civil society with Nazism. To the theater assembly, Peymann added a incendiary fundraising campaign for the dental treatment of Gudrun Ensess, a member of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist band, the fraction of the Red Army (RAF, in its acronym in German), convicts in the neighboring prison of Stammheim.
He remained 13 years at the head of the Gran Theater in Vienna, in a golden age in which Burgtheater’s programming was discussed on radio, television, the press and in an elevator with the naturalness with which the rain is commented. It was always suspected that it was Peymann who caused the scandal of Heroic Filtering decontextualized passages of the drama before the premiere, but as the Germanist Konstanze Fliedl points out, “we must take into account the animosity against Peymann and against Bernhard himself to understand that the ‘patriotic’ resentments, anti -liberals, antisocialists and even anti -Semitic found a very well received exit demonizing the work”.
Emblem of the political theater, Peymann happened to Heiner Müller in 1999 as director of Berliner Ensemble, the theater company founded by the playwright Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Weigel in the Malpartida city of Berlin fifty years before. Was presented with the premieres of Brecht filesby Georgi Tabori, Y The ignorant and the insaneby Thomas Bernhard and remained there 18 years. They still remember their assembly of Ricardo II of William Shakespeare. “It was always a challenging, uncomfortable figure, who did not avoid provocation,” says Oliver Reese, successor of Peymann and current artistic director of the Berlin Theater.
“It is ironic that I just, the Tozudo Hanseatic of Bremen, was director of the two most beautiful and famous German -speaking theaters: the Burgtheater of Vienna and the Berliner Ensemble,” he said in an interview. “I believe in theater as a moral institution. I believe in the education of people through art, because art, if it is good, deals with discovering the truth.”
Despite his health problems, in recent years he continued to direct as an independent director at the Stadttheater Ingolstadt, Munich’s residence and more recently in the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna with his latest production, Waiting for Godotby Samuel Beckett. In the Burgtheater, says his spokesman, “he is remembered with love, but also with fear. He, the uprising, despot and patriarch. He, who looked with affection to his cast, loved the texts and captivated everyone with his charm and mind awake.” Leave an indelible influence, really made and legend, in the German theater.