Kayssler, Friedrich

(1874-1945)

   Actor, director. Kayssler began acting with a university student group in Munich, where Otto Brahm saw him in 1895 and put him under contract at the Deutsches Theater. There, while still a young man, he performed a series of leading roles in the classics—Hamlet, Don Carlos, Götz von Berlichingen, Karl von Moor, and several others. He made a brief sojourn to Breslau in the late 1890s, but returned to Berlin in 1900 where he remained active for the rest of his life. While still working for Brahm, Kayssler joined Max Reinhardt and Martin Zickel in forming the Schall und Rauch (Noise and Smoke) cabaret in 1901, doing turns in Pierrot costumes from Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos, interlarding it with references from Gerhart Hauptmann's plays. Later they parodied symbolism, doing a skit called "Carleas et Elisande" by a certain "Isidor Mysterlinck."

   By that time, Kayssler had become in the public's mind an embodiment of the Schiller hero, a type he continued to play when Reinhardt took over the Deutsches Theater and throughout the remainder of the Wilhelmine period. In the Weimar Republic, he participated in several left-wing theatrical exercises, including the management of the Berlin Volksbühne. He hired Erwin Piscator to stage a series of inflammatory productions, and in 1925 he presented the German premiere of Soviet culture minister Anatoly Lunascharsky's The Unchained Don Quixote and the world premiere of Brest-Litovsk by Hans-José Rehfisch in 1930. His film work in the 1920s was politically neutral, though it included Gustav Ucicky's glorification of Frederick the Great with Otto Gebühr, titled Das Flötenkonzert von Sans Souci (The Flute Concert at Sans Souci).

   Kayssler's work in the Third Reich was prejudiced by his acceptance of the title Staatschauspieler (state actor), implying his consent to regime cultural policies. Such films as Friesenot (1935) and Unternehmen Michael (1937) exalted Nazi viewpoints and received praise from the Propaganda Ministry. His work in the theater tended toward the classics, though his 1937 portrayal of Armand Duval's father in Camille was probably his most popular role.