Straub, Agnes

(1890-1941)

   Actress. Straub was considered an outstanding actress in the Expressionist style immediately after World War I, but her career had begun a decade earlier in Heidelberg, playing the title role in Franz Grillparzer's Sappho. From Heidelberg she got engagements in Bonn and Königsberg before settling in Berlin for the 1915-1916 season. At both the Deutsches Theater and later at the newly renamed State Theater in Berlin, she excelled in heavy tragic roles such as Kriemhild in Friedrich Hebbel's Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs), William Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Queen Elizabeth in Friedrich Schiller's Maria Stuart, Clytemnestra in The Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus, the title role in Heinrich von Kleist's Penthislea, and Cäcilie in Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Stella. In addition to those well-known roles, she played the leads in new plays by Hans Henny Jahnn, Arnolt Bronnen, Ernst Barlach, Paul Kornfeld, and Georg Kaiser. In 1932 Straub became the first recipient of the Louise Dumont Award, given to the actress considered at the time to be the best in her field. Straub's career flourished in the Third Reich, and not only as an actress. She became one of the few female director-managers during the Nazi dictatorship when she leased the Kurfürstendamm Theater in Berlin's fashionable West End and ran it as the "Agnes Straub Theater am Kurfürstendamm."