Kurt Hirschfeld

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Kurt Hirschfeld

Kurt Hirschfeld (born March 10, 1902 in Lehrte ; † November 8, 1964 in Tegernsee ) was a German theater director and dramaturge in Zurich .

Life

Kurt Hirschfeld was born the son of the Jewish businessman Hermann Hirschfeld (1871–1941) and his wife Selma Zierl (1877–1926), daughter of a rabbi . He grew up in a religious family that was respected in the city. After attending secondary school in Lehrte, Hirschfeld switched to the Realgymnasium at Aegidientorplatz in Hanover in 1914 . Even in school he wrote and published poems and essays . Instead of working in class, he says he read literatures under the bank, to which I certainly had no access yet .

He studied philosophy , sociology , German and art history in Heidelberg , Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen . From 1930 he worked as a dramaturge at the Hessisches Landestheater Darmstadt . He made his directorial debut with Erich Kästner's life during this time .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, Hirschfeld was dismissed. At first he lived with friends in Berlin without being registered , then he received an offer from the director of the Pfauenbühne in Zurich Ferdinand Rieser and emigrated to Switzerland . He settled in quickly after initial difficulties, and through his work the provincial theater became one of the most important German-speaking theaters .

In 1934 Hirschfeld was dismissed, there had been differences with Rieser. From 1935 he worked as an editor in a publishing house , after which he went to Moscow as a correspondent . Here he also found a job as an assistant director , which he gave up when his colleague was arrested and shot by the communists . He went back to Switzerland, where he was involved in the rescue of the Zurich Schauspielhaus and worked there under Oskar Wälterlin as a dramaturge and from 1946 as a deputy director.

Hirschfeld staged, among others, Brecht's Herr Puntila and his servant Matti (premiered in 1948), whose In the Thicket of Cities (1960), O'Neill's The Ice Man Comes (1950), Sophocles ' King Oedipus (1954), Lessing's Emilia Galotti (1959), his Nathan the Wise (1964), TS Eliot's A Deserved Statesman (1960), Max Frisch's Andorra (first performance 1961) and Frank Wedekind's Lulu (1962).

In 1961 Hirschfeld became director of the Zürcher Schauspielhaus after Wolderlin's death. In 1962 he was honored with the Great Lower Saxony Culture Prize in Hanover and staged Dürrenmatt's Die Physiker at the Ballhof there .

In 1952 Hirschfeld married Tetta Scharff, daughter of the sculptor Edwin Scharff , and his daughter Ruth was born a year later. He died of lung cancer in 1964 at the age of 62 in a sanatorium on Tegernsee and was buried in the Israelite cemetery Oberer Friesenberg in Zurich.

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personal data
SURNAME Hirschfeld, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German dramaturge and director
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Taught
DATE OF DEATH November 8, 1964
Place of death Tegernsee