Ziegel, Erich

(1876-1950)

   Director. Ziegel assumed leadership of the Munich Kammerspiele in 1913, shortly after its founding in the former Munich Comedy Theater. He began an aggressive program of premiering a new play every two weeks. One of them was Ludwig Thoma's one-act Die Sippe (The CJan), after which Munich police arrested both Ziegel and the playwright on the theater's stage. Of the more than 30 plays Ziegel presented, he directed over half of them. Ziegel left the Munich Kammerspiele in 1916 to found the Hamburg Kammerspiele, where he opened his administration with a week of Frank Wedekind plays. He continued to premiere new plays, many of them by then-unknown Expressionists. He briefly directed the Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus in the mid-1920s when the Kammerspiele was torn down. After it was rebuilt in 1932, he returned there until 1934, when the Gestapo threatened him after he staged a production of a play by Johann Wolfgang Goethe they felt was "insulting." He departed for Vienna, where he found little work; he then returned periodically to Berlin to work for Gustaf Gründgens.