Asja Lācis

Asja Anna Ernestowna Lācis , née Liepiņa (born October 19, 1891 in Līgatne , Latvia ; † November 21, 1979 in Riga ) was a Latvian actress, director and theater director.

Life

Asja Lācis was born in 1891 on the Ķempji estate in Latvia. The father was an upholsterer in the Riga wagon factory , while the mother ran a small shop. After attending high school in Riga, Asja Lācis studied from 1912 for three semesters at the General Faculty of the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg . She was enthusiastic about the theater from an early age. Her role model Vsevolod Emiljewitsch Meyerhold was active in Petersburg . She was particularly impressed by the avant-garde work of Mayakovsky and the director Nikolai Jewreinow . In 1914 she married Jūlijs Lācis and began the following year with his studies at the Schanjawski - People's University (now Russian State University for the Humanities ) in Moscow . She began her acting training in 1916 in Theodor Komissarschewski's studio . After her return to Oryol , she founded a proletarian children's theater there and took over the directing work. She integrated a method of improvisation with which she used the children's imagination . A little later she designed performances in the workers' theater in Riga.

In 1922 she went to Berlin and got to know the theater scene there. She came into contact with Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht , who met on her initiative in 1924. Together with Benjamin she wrote an essay on Naples and worked on his passage work . He made them known to a wider audience with his essay on the program of proletarian children's theater . In 1925, Asja Lācis played in Die Kamelliendame at the Deutsches Theater under the direction of her future husband, the director and theater theorist Bernhard Reich . In 1928 she became film director at the trade department of the Soviet embassy in Berlin.

Over the next few years she supported Ernst Toller and Erwin Piscator on their travels to the Soviet Union . For example, she took over as Piscator's assistant director for the film adaptation of Anna Seghers ' novella Rebellion of the Fishermen of St. Barbara . She made Brecht's work better known there and now devoted herself to film. In 1932 she enrolled at the scriptwriting faculty at the Soviet Cinema Institute in Moscow . The following year she took over the direction of the Latvian theater "Skatuve" (Latvian: stage).

In 1938 Asja Lācis was arrested by the NKVD and interned in labor camps in Kazakhstan until 1948 . She then returned to Latvia and went to the Valmiera Theater as a director . In the mid-1950s she contacted Brecht and Piscator again and pushed Brecht through as a director on the Latvian stages. She joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 . After her retirement in 1958, she worked as a theater critic. Asja Lācis died in Riga in 1979.

Works

• Анна Лацис: Революционный театр Германии (Revolutionary Theater in Germany). Goslitisdat, Moscow 1935.
• Анна Лацис: Красная гвоздика. воспоминания (The red carnation. Memories). Liesma, Riga 1984; Moscow 2018.
• Asja Lacis: a revolutionary at work. Reports on proletarian theater, on Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin and Piscator . Edited by Hildegard Brenner . Rogner and Bernhard, Munich 1971; Digital copy (PDF) at monoskop.org.

literature

• Heinz-Uwe Haus : In memoriam Asja Lacis (October 19, 1891– November 21, 1979) . - In: John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, John Willett (Eds.): Brecht, Women and Politics . Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1985, pp. 138-147.
• Beata Paskevica: In the city of slogans. Asja Lacis, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht . Klartext, Essen 2006.

Web links

• Literature by and about Asja Lācis in the catalog of the German National Library
• http://www.scheinschlag.de/archiv/2001/09_2001/texte/28.html

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Review by Konstantin Kharitonov (Russian) at syg.ma.