Theater für ein besseres Deutschland

In the organizer's words:

Lecture by Esther Slevogt (nachtkritik.de) as part of the Night of Libraries and "Düsseldorf remembers - 80 years of the end of the war and liberation".

In the winter of 1945, Wolfgang Langhoff became the first post-war director of the Städtische Bühnen Düsseldorf. Even before 1933, he had been one of the most prominent actors in Düsseldorf at Louise Dumont's Schauspielhaus. As a communist, he had also worked on new, activist and free theater formats: Agitprop theater was the name of the game at the time. After the Reichstag fire in 1933, he was arrested in Düsseldorf, followed by torture and imprisonment in a concentration camp. He managed to escape to Switzerland in 1934. As a member of the legendary émigré ensemble at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, Langhoff published his famous book Die Moorsoldaten in Switzerland in 1935, one of the first ever reports on the Nazi terror. Langhoff returned to Düsseldorf in 1945. Here, his communist comrades-in-arms and friends from the years before 1933, who had gone through hell with him in the concentration camp, were appointed to political office by the British occupying forces. For example, the artist Hanns Kralik, who was now the communist head of cultural affairs in Düsseldorf and campaigned for Langhoff's appointment as artistic director. Now at last, they all hoped, they would be able to realize their plans for a better Germany, which had been so brutally thwarted by the Nazis. The fate of his communist friends and comrades in Adenauer's Federal Republic, where they were soon persecuted again and expelled from the political system, would continue to shape Langhoff's thoughts and actions long after he had become the director of the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin, later the most important stage in the GDR. Langhoff also met Gustaf Gründgens at the Deutsches Theater in 1946 and, together with his communist friends in Düsseldorf politics, secured his appointment as his successor at the Städtische Bühnen. The lecture provides insights into an unknown chapter of German-German post-war history.