Günther Rühle

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Günther Rühle (born June 3, 1924 in Gießen ; † December 10, 2021 in Bad Soden ) was a German critic , publicist and artistic director . As head of the features section of major German daily newspapers, Rühle was considered one of the most influential theater critics from the 1960s onwards. From 1985 to 1990 he was director of the Frankfurt theater .

Günther Rühle was a member of the PEN Center Germany . From 1993 to 1999 he was President of the German Academy of Performing Arts in Frankfurt, later its Honorary President. In 2009, the award for the best acting performance , which was awarded during the Young Actors Week , was renamed the Günther Rühle Award .

His career

Family, childhood and youth

Günther Rühle was born the son of an auditor. He grew up in Weilburg an der Lahn until 1935 , then in Bremen , where he attended the old grammar school from 1935 to 1942 . In July 1942 he was drafted into labor service and from October 1942 to military service in the Air Force (Flak). In 1946 he made up his Abitur at his secondary school in Bremen. A famous ancestor of Rühle was the Prussian general and friend of Heinrich von Kleist, Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern .

Theater critic

From 1946 to 1952 he studied German , history and folklore at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . After receiving his doctorate , he switched to the Frankfurter Rundschau as a journalist in 1953 . In 1954 he went to the feature section of the Frankfurter Neue Presse . Since joining the FAZ in 1960, Rühle has developed into an influential theater critic . In 1974 he took over the management of the feature section there. In 1990 Rühle became head of the features section of the Berliner Tagesspiegel .

Intendant

In 1984 he was won by Hilmar Hoffmann, the then Frankfurt head of cultural affairs, as the successor to the departing Adolf Dresen . From 1985 to 1990 he was his successor as artistic director of the Frankfurt theater. Rühle hired Michael Gruner and Dietrich Hilsdorf as in-house directors, discovered actors like Martin Wuttke and Thomas Thieme and promoted the director and poet Einar Schleef . 1985 staged Dietrich Hilsdorf the controversial Fassbinder -Stück Garbage, the City and Death in the Kammerspiele of the play Frankfurt, and it came because of alleged anti-Semitic tendencies in the piece to the scandal . With an occupation of the stage by 30 members v. a. the Jewish community was prevented from premiering on October 31, 1985. Rühle scheduled a performance for around 200 critics and employees of the theater for November 4th, which the publisher rated as a world premiere. The Frankfurter Rundschau wrote on November 5, 1985: "The Frankfurter Theater has taken it upon itself ... to provide evidence ... that Fassbinder's scenes are not determined by an anti-Semitic attitude." Due to the ongoing protests, the play was canceled. because the safety of the audience could not be guaranteed.

For the East German director Einar Schleef, the time in Frankfurt in the directorship of Günther Rühle brought the artistic breakthrough. Rühle stuck to Schleef and guaranteed him continuous job opportunities - despite the initial failure of the productions and violent attacks by the Frankfurt theater critics against Schleef. In 1988, however, the Schauspiel Frankfurt was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen with Schleef's production Before Sunrise .

In 1989 Hilmar Hoffmann offered the director Rühle a three-year contract extension; Rühle refused, justifying this with the consistently negative reactions of the Frankfurt press to the performances at his house. His term of office ended with the 1989/90 season.

Journalistic activity

From 1995 Rühle worked as a freelance journalist . He was the main editor of the work edition in individual volumes by Alfred Kerr at S. Fischer, President of the Alfred Kerr Foundation in Berlin and editor of the collected works of Marieluise Fleißer at Suhrkamp. In 1988, Rühle's two-volume work on the history of German theater criticism was published: Theater for the Republic. In the mirror of criticism.

The first volume of his two-volume documentation of German theater history Theater in Deutschland 1887 to 1945. His Events - His People was published in 2007 by S. Fischer; The second volume followed in 2014, covering the years from 1945 to 1966. The work is praised almost unanimously by the critics because of the enormous knowledge of details and the clear presentation and is considered a standard work in the history of theater. A third volume completed at Rühle's request by Hermann Beil and Stephan Dörschel is to be published posthumously.

Günther Rühle died in December 2021 at the age of 97.

Awards and honors

Rühle was an honorary citizen of the city of Bensheim .

Fonts (selection)

  • Theater in our time , 3 volumes: Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1976/1982/1992
  • as editor: books that moved the century. Time analyzes, reread. Piper, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02399-1 ; Fischer TB 5008, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-596-25008-0 .
  • Theater for the Republic. In the mirror of criticism. 1. Vol. 1917-1925. Revised new edition. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-10-068503-2 .
  • Theater for the Republic. In the mirror of criticism. 2. Vol. 1926-1933. Revised new edition. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-10-068504-0 .
  • Theater in Germany 1887–1945. Its events - its people. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-068508-7 . Extracts
  • Theater in Germany 1945–1966. Its events - its people. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-001461-0 . Extracts
  • An old man gets older. A strange diary. Edited by Gerhard Ahrens, Alexander Verlag, Berlin 2021, ISBN 978-3-89581-576-8 .

literature

  • C. Bernd Sucher (Ed.): Theater Lexicon, authors, directors, actors, dramaturges, stage designers, critics. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-423-03322-3 .
  • What I write will one day be considered the truth. A conversation with the theater man Günther Rühle, who turns 95 today, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 3, 2019, p. 9.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berlin.de News from December 10, 2021: Theater critic and ex-director Günther Rühle is dead , accessed on December 10, 2021
  2. ↑ A chance for the new: Günther Rühle turns 80 by Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit June 3, 2004
  3. ↑ Günther Rühle in the Munzinger archive , accessed on December 10, 2021 ( beginning of the article freely accessible)
  4. ↑ Schonzone und Schonzeit by Hans Schueler, Die Zeit December 5, 1986
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Behrens: Einar Schleef. Work and person . Verlag Theater der Zeit Berlin, 2003. ISBN 3-934344-30-5 , p. 135
  6. ↑ Review notes on theater in Germany 1887–1945 at perlentaucher.de
  7. ↑ Günther Rühle is dead , boersenblatt.net, published and accessed on December 10, 2021.
  8. ↑ bensheim.de: https://archive.today/2013.08.08-084104/http://www.bensheim.de/web/index.cfm?pm=news&NewsID=1086&IDMenu=22
  9. ↑ Excerpts from: Max Weber : The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism ; Walther Rathenau : Of things to come ; Ernst Bloch : Spirit of Utopia ; Oswald Spengler : The Fall of the Occident ; Karl Barth: The Letter to the Romans ; Georg Lukács : History and Class Consciousness ; Martin Heidegger : What is metaphysics? ; Sigmund Freud : The Uneasiness in Culture ; José Ortega y Gasset : The revolt of the masses ; Alfred Rosenberg : The Myth of the Twentieth Century ; Karl Jaspers : The intellectual situation of the time ; Ernst Jünger : The worker. Rule and form ; Helmuth Plessner : The belated nation ; Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno : Dialectic of Enlightenment ; Romano Guardini : The End of Modern Times ; Günther Anders : The antiquated nature of man ; Arnold Gehlen : The soul in the technical age ; Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich : The inability to mourn ; Herbert Marcuse : The one-dimensional person .
personal data
SURNAME Rühle, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater critic, director and publicist
BIRTH DATE June 3, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH pour
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH bad Soden