Alwin Kronacher

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Alwin Kronacher , according to the birth certificate Albin Kronacher , after emigration Alvin Kronacher (born November 18, 1880 in Bamberg , † January 2, 1951 in Berkeley ) was a German dramaturge , director and theater manager .

Alwin Kronacher

Life

Kronacher came from a Jewish family. His father Karl Kronacher (1852–1921) was a merchant in Bamberg, his mother Babette Bauer (1857–1892) came from Buttenwiesen . Kronacher attended high school in Coburg and Karlsruhe and then studied law in Geneva, Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg. With his dissertation Is the Zechprellerei Fraud he was there in 1905 with Karl von Lilienthal to the Dr. iur. PhD .

In 1910 he became a dramaturge at the court theater in Karlsruhe . Later he also worked as an acting director and director. In 1916 he moved to Bremen, in 1919 to the Alte Theater Leipzig , where he became theater director in 1921. He was one of the most important personalities in theater life in the Weimar Republic and particularly promoted expressionist theater in Leipzig and staged works by Bertolt Brecht , Walter Hasenclever , Georg Kaiser and Franz Werfel .

In 1929 he was appointed director of the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt to succeed Richard Weichert . The dissolution of his contract in Leipzig, where he was employed for life, led to legal disputes between the cities of Leipzig and Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, Kronacher continued to rely on first performances, for example by the poet Fritz von Unruh , and staged contemporary tabloids, folk and dialect pieces, but above all classical dramas. In the Goethe year 1932 he staged a cycle with nine plays by Goethe in his native city and founded the Römerberg Festival together with Max Michel, head of the cultural department . The first performance was on June 18, 1932, Goethe's Urgötz in front of 1500 paying spectators. The Egmont was staged on July 21, 1932 .

On March 13, 1933, the National Socialists came to power in Frankfurt . The synchronization of the municipal theaters began immediately . Kronacher was given leave of absence on March 28, 1933 because of his " non-Aryan descent " and his " non- German " schedule. His last production of Faust. He was allowed to finish the second part of the tragedy . However, the premiere on April 22, 1933 took place under the name of his National Socialist successor, Hans Geisow .

Kronacher emigrated to Basel, where he was senior stage director at the city ​​theater for one season . Because his contract was not renewed, he went to Paris in 1934, where at the end of 1938 he staged Ödön von Horváth's Glaube Liebe Hoffnung at the German émigré theater Salle de Iéna . In 1939 he finally emigrated to the USA, where he became a professor at the University of Delaware in 1941 and professor of dramaturgy in the Department of Arts at the University of California, Berkeley in 1949 .

Works (selection)

  • Is the bill cheating fraud? Inaugural dissertation, University of Heidelberg 1905
  • The art of the director , master, Heidelberg 1913
  • The German Speech Stage in Our Time , Osterheld & Co., Berlin 1929

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Janine Burnick, Jürgen Steen: The "seizure" of opera and drama. In: Frankfurt am Main 1933–1945. Institute for Urban History , October 21, 2014, accessed on September 7, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Kronacher, Alwin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kronacher, Albin; Kronacher, Alvin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German dramaturge, director and theater manager
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Bamberg
DATE OF DEATH January 2, 1951
Place of death Berkeley