Goetz, Curt

(Kurt Götz, 1888-1960)

   Playwright, actor. In the 1920s Goetz became known as "the German Noël Coward" by virtue of his translations and subsequent imitations of the English boule-vardier. He got his first acting job in Rostock, and in 1910 Viktor Barnowsky hired Goetz for roles in plays by George Bernard Shaw at Berlin's Lessing Theater. In that venue, Goetz's success with Shaw roles led him to begin writing his own plays. His first effort, Ingeborg (1921), proved to be a hit for Barnowsky, as did Der Lampenschirm (The Lamp Shade, 1923). When Barnowsky moved to the Theater in der Königgrätzer Strasse in 1925, Goetz went with him, and his career flourished throughout the Weimar Republic; his biggest hit in those years was Hokuspokus, which ultimately had more than 2,000 performances. During the Third Reich, Goetz enjoyed an even loftier status than he had in the Republic, with 236 different productions of his plays from 1933 to 1944. Even when he left Europe in 1939 and sailed for New York, Nazi authorities did not interpret his departure as defection; productions of his plays by the score remained in the repertoires of most theaters. In New York, Goetz staged Das Haus in Montevideo (The House in Montevideo) — a comedy about a German professor with 12 children who inherits a brothel in Paraguay—on Broadway under the title It's a Gift. After World War II, he returned to Europe and resumed work in Germany, maintaining an unrivaled popularity and appeal, directing and starring in productions of his own plays on tour and making two films that were among the most popular of the 1950s.