Max Reinhardt

• 1. Introduction

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  Max Reinhardt was born Maximilian Goldmann on the 9th of September 1873 in the spa town of Baden bei Wien, and by the time he died in New York City on the 30th of October 1943, he had remade the European stage from the inside out. His name appeared on eleven stages in Berlin simultaneously. He co-founded a festival that still runs today in the square before a cathedral, with the Alps as its backdrop. He directed James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland in a Shakespeare film that the Nazis promptly banned.

  How did an apprentice bank clerk from a Jewish merchant family become one of the most consequential theatre directors of the early twentieth century? How did a single 1917 staging of a previously unproduced play launch an entire artistic movement? And what happened to the castle he bought in Salzburg, the one that years after his death would double as the Von Trapp family home in The Sound of Music? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Stage Name, First Stage

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  In 1890, a seventeen-year-old from Baden bei Wien made his debut on a private stage in Vienna. He had finished school, briefly taken up a bank apprenticeship, and quietly been attending acting lessons on the side. For the debut he chose the name Max Reinhardt, possibly borrowing it from the protagonist of Theodor Storm's novella Immensee.

  By 1893, he had moved to the Salzburg City Theatre, and one year after that he relocated to Berlin, joining the ensemble at the Deutsches Theater under director Otto Brahm. Berlin was then one of the great centers of European theatrical life, and Brahm's company was among its most serious institutions. Reinhardt had positioned himself at the center of something important before he had turned twenty-five.

  In 1901, together with Friedrich Kayßler and several colleagues, he co-founded the Schall und Rauch kabarett stage in Berlin, meaning Sound and Smoke. When the space re-opened as the Kleines Theater, or Little Theatre, it became the first of many stages where he worked as director.

• 3. The Expressionist Premiere

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  On the 23rd of December 1917, Reinhardt presided over the world premiere of Reinhard Sorge's play Der Bettler, a work that critic Michael Paterson later described as "a succès de scandale, an innovation, changing the course of theatrical history with its revolutionary staging techniques."

  Reinhardt had purchased the rights from Sorge back in 1913, and had spent four years meticulously planning how to stage it. Sorge had already won the Kleist Prize for the play, but no one had yet produced it in front of an audience.

  The trick at the heart of the production was spatial. As Paterson described it, the play opens with the audience apparently positioned backstage, hearing voices from what seems like the auditorium out front. A simple inversion, but a deeply disorienting one. The lighting did the rest. Scholar Walter H. Sokel described the effect: "The lighting apparatus behaves like the mind. It drowns in darkness what it wishes to forget and bathes in light what it wishes to recall."

  After the premiere, productions immediately spread to other German cities including Cologne. After the Armistice of 1918, German-language newspapers in the United States published articles praising the production. Critics and scholars would later credit that single staging with giving birth to Expressionism in the theatre, and ultimately in motion pictures as well.

• 4. Stages, Festivals, Collaborators

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  From 1903 to 1905, Reinhardt managed the Neues Theater, the building now known as Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. In 1906, he acquired the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In 1911, he premiered Karl Vollmöller's The Miracle in London at Olympia, which gave him an international reputation beyond the German-speaking world.

  By 1930, he was running eleven stages in Berlin and also managing the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, which he had taken on from 1924 to 1933. Between 1915 and 1918, he additionally served as director of the Volksbühne theatre. The sheer scale of his operation was unlike anything his contemporaries could claim.

  From 1910 to 1913, Reinhardt contributed to the Swedish avant-garde theatre magazine Thalia. In 1920, he co-established the Salzburg Festival with composer Richard Strauss and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The inaugural production placed Hofmannsthal's adaptation of the Medieval Dutch morality play Everyman in the square before the Salzburg Cathedral, with the Alps rising behind it. In October 1922, Reinhardt was in the audience at the Roland Theater in Vienna when the Vilna Troupe staged The Dybbuk. He rushed backstage afterward to congratulate the actors.

  One of his most frequent collaborators from the 1910s into the early 1930s was a Swedish-born American composer and conductor who served as music department head across his theatres. On international tours, that collaborator would travel ahead to audition singers and actors at the next performance location. For the Hofmannsthal productions, the collaborator also composed original incidental music.

• 5. Schloss Leopoldskron

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  In 1918, Reinhardt purchased Schloss Leopoldskron, a castle near Salzburg. It was not just a private residence but a creative base for his Austrian work, tied geographically to the Salzburg Festival he had helped found two years later.

  After Germany's Anschluss annexation of Austria in 1938, the Nazis seized the castle. Reinhardt fled first to Britain and then to the United States, where in 1940 he became a naturalized citizen. He was then married to his second wife, actress Helene Thimig, daughter of the actor Hugo Thimig and sister of actors Hans and Hermann Thimig.

  Reinhardt died in New York City in 1943, before the end of the war. After 1945, the castle was restored to his heirs. It later became widely known as the filming location for the early garden scenes in the movie The Sound of Music. His papers and literary estate eventually came to rest at Binghamton University in the Max Reinhardt Archives and Library.

• 6. Hollywood and the Nazi Ban

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  Reinhardt had taken an interest in film earlier than most of his theatre contemporaries. His first staging for film was Sumurûn in 1910. He also founded his own film company and sold the rights to The Miracle to producer Joseph Menchen, whose full-color 1912 adaptation gained worldwide success. Two films he made under a four-picture contract with German producer Paul Davidson, released in 1913 and 1914, received negative reviews from press and public. The remaining two contracted films were never made.

  In 1935, he directed A Midsummer Night's Dream for Warner Brothers in the United States, his first and only American film. The cast included James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown, and Olivia de Havilland. Rooney and de Havilland had also appeared in Reinhardt's 1934 stage production of the same play, staged at the Hollywood Bowl.

  The Nazis banned the film. The Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels objected to the Jewish ancestry of Reinhardt himself, of classical composer Felix Mendelssohn whose music was used throughout, and of soundtrack arranger Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose work Goebbels had already classified as degenerate. The ban made the film an infamous case study in Nazi cultural censorship.

• 7. Schools and Legacy

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  Reinhardt founded several drama schools whose influence outlasted his own career. He established the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin, the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, and in the United States, the Max Reinhardt Workshop on Sunset Boulevard and the Max Reinhardt Junior Workshop. The Max Reinhardt Seminar is regarded as arguably the most important German-language acting school.

  He acquired the building for the Hollywood school in an unusual way: he won the Ben Bard Drama playhouse on Wilshire Boulevard from Ben Bard in a poker game. Students at the Hollywood school included Alan Ladd, Jack Carson, Robert Ryan, Gower Champion, Shirley Temple, Angie Dickinson, and Cliff Robertson. In 1938, Walden Philip Boyle, who would later become a founding faculty member of the Department of Theater Arts at UCLA, worked at the Max Reinhardt Theatre Academy in Hollywood.

  His sons by his first wife Else Heims, Wolfgang and Gottfried Reinhardt, became well-regarded film producers. One of his grandsons by adoption, Stephen Reinhardt, was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and served there until his death in 2018. On the 18th of November 2015, the Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin inaugurated a memorial at Friedrichstraße 107 to Reinhardt and two of his closest collaborators, architect Hans Poelzig and director Erik Charell.