Hamburg

   Hamburg has enjoyed several illustrious periods of theater activity, the first and foremost of which was the formation there in 1765 of the first "national" theater in Germany. The attempt in that year to establish a troupe on a permanent basis, supported by the independent resources of businessmen instead of a court, initially failed. Still, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy testified to the importance of that effort even though it failed. Friedrich Ludwig Schröder reestablished a permanent company in 1774 and led it to unprecedented heights, comparable to the renown Johann Wolfgang Goethe enjoyed in Weimar. In 1827 the city council built a new Hamburg City Theater, based on plans by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, with a troupe that included Emil Devrient and Christine Enghaus. In the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1842, the Thalia Theater was founded, and in 1874 the City Theater was refurbished. Several small theaters arose in the latter half of the 19th century, though none could compare with the splendid new Deutsches Schauspielhaus built in 1900. Designed by the firm of Fellner and Hellmer, this granite-clad structure bespoke Hamburg's rapidly expanding wealth and prominence in the German Reich. In 1912 the Thalia Theater was rebuilt.

   In World War II, all of Hamburg's theaters were either destroyed or severely damaged—yet within a decade of the war's conclusion, all of them had been rebuilt and several more added to an already bustling theater culture. The appointment of Gustaf Gründgens as intendant of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in 1955 was a significant juncture in Hamburg's renewal. His staging of Hamlet, with Maximilian Schell in the title role, was a high point in Hamburg's history during the 1950s, exceeded only by Gründgens himself as Archie Rice in Heinz Hilpert's 1957 German premiere of John Osborne's The Entertainer. Gründgens presented the world premieres of Carl Zuckmayer's The Cold Light in 1955 and Bertolt Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards in 1959. Perhaps surpassing them all was Gründgens's Mephisto in his staging of Faust, Part 1 at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus; Gründgens had actually created the production in Düsseldorf, but Hamburg gladly accepted it as a phenomenon in its midst, and thousands of Germans flocked to the city to witness what many observers regarded as the performance of a lifetime.