Schütte, Ernst

(1877-1948)

   Designer. Schütte was a gifted designer for Max Reinhardt and later Heinz Hilpert. His design for Arthur Hopkins's Burlesque (under the German title Artisten) in 1928 employed a stage revolve to capture the play's circus milieu. Schütte's use of a stage revolve was characteristic of his sense of the cinematic rather than the atmospheric; for the world premiere of Fritz von Unruh's satire on the film industry, Phea, in 1930, he used it again to portray the hectic activity typical of film studios in Berlin, churning out movies on a weekly basis. Reinhardt entrusted to Schütte the designs for several other world premieres he produced late in the Weimar period with Hilpert directing: Ferdinand Bruckner's Elisabeth von England(1930), Carl Zuckmayer's Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (The Captain of Köpenick, 1931), Ödön von Horvâth's Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (Tales of the Vienna Woods, 1931), and Gerhart Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenuntergang (Before Sunset, 1932). Schütte was forced into exile in 1934 because he refused to divorce his Jewish wife, yet his skills were so highly prized as a designer even among the Nazis that Hilpert was able to offer him the head designer's job at the Deutsches Theater with full assurances from the regime that they would allow Schütte's wife and daughter to remain in Berlin with him unmolested.