William W. Melnitz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William W. Melnitz , born Wilhelm Wolf Chmelnitzky , (born April 14, 1900 in Cologne ; died January 12, 1989 in Los Angeles , California , United States ) was a German theater actor , theater director , dramaturge and professor of theater studies in the USA.

Live and act

Wilhelm Wolf Chmelnitzky came from a Jewish family. At the age of 20 he began studying, which took him to the universities of Cologne and Berlin for the next three years. At the same time he was already employed as a director and dramaturge in Cologne. In 1923 Chmelnitzky went to the Münster City Theater for two years, and in the following season 1925/26 he was engaged as an actor and director at the Small Theater in Kassel. This was followed by an engagement at the New Theater in Frankfurt am Main, where Chmelnitzky / Melnitz worked as director and dramaturge from 1926 to 1930. For the last three years of the Weimar Republic he went to the Bremen theater as senior director. In the last pre-Hitler season he also returned to Frankfurt's Neue Theater as a guest director. After the National Socialists seized power on January 30, 1933, Wilhelm Chmelnitzky was immediately excluded from the German cultural scene. He now only found work at the recently founded Kulturbund Deutscher Juden Berlin. Here he staged Shakespeare's Othello towards the end of 1933 . He then went to Vienna, where he was Vice Director of the German People's Theater from 1935 to 1938. The annexation of Austria to Adolf Hitler's Germany made it impossible to continue working in Vienna. Melnitz then evaded to Switzerland, where he was allowed to stage at the city theater of St. Gallen.

In April 1939 William and his wife Ruth Melnitz emigrated to the USA. The attempt to set up a theater in exile with German-speaking artists, for which Melnitz was staging, quickly failed due to cost reasons and a lack of demand. On the Austrian stage in New York, Melnitz staged plays such as Arthur Schnitzler's Komtesse and Bruno Frank's Sturm im Wasserglas for a tiny audience . At times the director, who was once respected in Germany, worked in a laundry to keep himself and his wife afloat financially. In 1940 the Melnitzens followed an invitation from Max Reinhardt to Hollywood. Here Melnitz was supposed to work in Reinhardt's workshops. Unable to find employment in the Los Angeles-based film industry, Melnitz began studying at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was also a secretary in Franz Werfel's service. In 1947 he received his doctorate with the dissertation War and Revolution on the Stage of the Weimar Republic . Melnitz continued his university career as a lecturer or professor of theater studies and was finally dean of the College of Fine Arts at UCLA in 1960. As a director, William Melnitz staged classical plays such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1958), Schiller's Don Karlos (1960), Dürrenmatt's Die Panne (1961), Schnitzler's Liebelei (1962) and Shakespeare's Winter Tale (1964). In 1967 a UCLA building was named “Melnitz Hall” after the important university professor and theater maker. From 1966 to 1968 William Melnitz was professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, from 1969 to 1973 at the State University of New York. He also took over the management of the Max Reinhardt Archive.

Personal

William Melnitz, who was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class in 1959 , had an uncle in Curt Melnitz (1879–1962) who also made a career in the USA: he was a press representative, artist agent, studio representative and film producer. In addition, William Melnitz wrote a wealth of writings on theater topics.

literature

  • Trapp, Frithjof; Mittenzwei, Werner; Rischbieter, Henning; Schneider, Hansjörg: Handbook of the German-speaking Exile Theater 1933–1945 / Biographical Lexicon of Theater Artists . Volume 2, pp. 657 f., Munich 1999.
  • Thomas Blubacher : William W. Melnitz, in: Kotte, Andreas (ed.): Theaterlexikon der Schweiz , Chronos Verlag Zürich 2005, Volume 2, p. 1226.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ William W. Melnitz on deathfigures.com
  2. ^ Wilhelm Chmelnitzky on ancestry.com
  3. ^ William Melnitz on libraries.psu.edu

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Melnitz, William W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chmelnitzky, Wilhelm Wolf (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater director, dramaturge and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 1989
Place of death Los Angeles , California , United States