Ihering, Herbert

(1888-1977)

   Critic. Along with Alfred Kerr, Ihering was one of the two most influential theater critics from the late Wilhelmine period through the end of the Weimar Republic. He attempted to remain active under the Third Reich, but Joseph Goebbels banished him in 1935 to the casting office of the Tobis film studio; later Heinz Hilpert hired him as a dramaturg at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. After the war Ihering resumed his journalistic career and continued writing lengthy essays. He had been the first to recognize Bertolt Brecht, awarding him the Kleist Prize in 1922. Long before that, he recognized and wrote about the significant personalities and developments that revolutionized the German theater in the 1920s. His principal venue was the Berliner Börsen-Courier, a newspaper whose focus was the financial world. hhering described theater reviewing as an analysis of artistic energy, and he therefore judged most productions according to the challenges they presented to both performers and audiences. He was one of Max Reinhardt's harshest critics, and he likewise loathed the slick boulevard comedies on offer by the dozen every season in Berlin. hhering was perhaps Berlin's finest critical thinker, given to extended examinations of plays or productions he thought offered new developments. He was rarely a theater fan in the manner of his archrival Kerr; to Ihering, theater was a serious undertaking with implications for German culture as a whole. His writing style was spare and to the point; as Fritz Kortner once noted, "You read [Ihering's] reviews to improve your grammar."