Gustaf Gründgens - Mephisto incarnate

As an actor, director and artistic director, Gustaf Gründgens was legendary. His behavior during the Nazi era is controversial. The career of Gustaf Gründgens - Mephisto incarnate - began and ended on Hamburg's stages.

by Britta Probol

Coolly and ironically he ensnared the doubting Dr. Faust, eyes flashing demoniacally in his black and white face:Gustaf Gründgens, born on December 22, 1899, was the German Mephisto. More than 350 times he played the devil trying to tempt Goethe's desperate scholars. It was his signature role.

"I always worked too much and forgot to live. Now I want to learn how to live before the gates close," said Gründgens in his only television interview. He was 63 years old and went on a world tour with his partner. But shortly afterwards Gründgens died on October 7, 1963 from an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel in the Philippine capital Manila. Whether it was suicide or an accident could never be determined.

He celebrated his first and last major successes in Hamburg

Gründgens was only able to really take off with his theater career in Berlin in the 1930s, in the capital of Nazi Germany. But the actor, director and artistic director celebrated his first and last major successes in Hamburg. The grave of the native Rhinelander, who grew up in Düsseldorf, is in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery, just a few steps from the main entrance above Cordesallee. He rests there in the company of other theater greats, such as Ida Ehre (1900-1989), who breathed new life into the Hamburger Kammerspiele after the Second World War.

Gustaf becomes Gustaf

That little theater on Hartungstrasse was a center of modern stage life in Germany during the Weimar period. This is where Gründgens - after his acting training in Düsseldorf and brief engagements in Halberstadt, Kiel and Berlin - left his suitcase at the age of 23, and it was here that he took over directing for the first time in 1924. And here he literally put the finishing touches to his name:the banal Gustav became the striving for higher Gustaf Gründgens on brochures for his first own production, with the "f" towering proudly.

Scandalous productions with the young men

He caused a sensation in Hamburg, among other things, with the staging of Klaus Mann's first stage work "Anja und Esther". In 1925, the announcement "Poet's Children Play Theater" attracted crowds to the Kammerspiele. In fact, the Thomas Mann offspring Klaus and his sister Erika were on stage with Gründgens. Critics slammed the piece, and the homoerotic allusions provoked a scandal, but Gründgens attracted attention far beyond the city limits. The production also put him in the fast lane privately:in the summer of 1926 he married Erika Mann - although both were homosexual. After bad reviews for Gründgens' production of the second man, however, his relationship with Klaus and Erika became increasingly muddled. The marriage didn't even last three years.

Berlin:"It's like going back to sixth grade after high school"

In 1928 Gründgens left Hamburg to get a taste of the capital. Here Max Reinhardt dominated the theater scene, and the man "from the provinces" was a nobody. After the successes in Hamburg, Berlin was like a transfer "back to the sixth grade after high school," Gründgens remarked in retrospect. But with his ambition, he soon won major engagements again, was allowed to play the role of Hamlet he loved so much and finally, in the 1932/33 season, stood on the stage of the Staatstheater am Gendarmenmarkt as Goethe's Mephistopheles. The influential Nazi man Hermann Göring saw him here - and was enthusiastic.

Gustaf Gründgens:Kneeling before the National Socialists

From then on, the National Socialist held his protective hand over Gründgens. And not only that:in 1934 Göring offered him the position of director of the Prussian State Theater. Gründgens accepted. Some - especially writers from exile - accused the theater man of having "collaborated with the National Socialist evil spirit" because of his own career. In 1936 Klaus Mann reviled Gründgens as an unscrupulous follower in his roman à clef "Mephisto".

Companions and biographers largely agree that Gründgens was not a political person:if he was, then his heart was beating rather to the left. With Göring, for example, Gründgens managed to ensure that Jewish ensemble members and those close to the SPD received letters of protection so that they were safe during SS raids. He made no secret of his homosexuality to his highest employer, but nevertheless married the actress Marianne Hoppe in 1936. This marriage of convenience lasted until the end of the Third Reich.

Gründgens himself always maintained that he wanted to protect art against politics. He put classics on the repertoire until the theater was ordered to close, and in a faithful interpretation. Gründgens' credo:"The viewer should understand what the actor says. The actor should understand what the poet says. And the poet should understand what he says himself."

Reconstruction in Berlin and Düsseldorf

After volunteering in the war in Holland and nine months in a camp in the Soviet Union, Gründgens returned to the skies in 1947, which meant everything to him. His first appearance on the stage at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin was greeted with frenetic applause. Nevertheless, he went back to his old home in Düsseldorf that same year. He was General Manager there for eight years, first of the municipal theater and then of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, and played a key role in shaping cultural reconstruction.

Standard-setting era at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus

Finally, in 1955, Gustaf Gründgens accepted another call to Hamburg. This time not to the Kammerspiele, which Ida Ehrlich had made a leading stage in the meantime, but to the Deutsches Schauspielhaus. Under him as General Manager and Artistic Director, the Theater an der Kirchenallee experienced a golden era with internationally acclaimed performances of modern theater literature and acclaimed productions of classics. His "Faust I" from 1957 wrote theater history as "Hamburger Faust". Gründgens brought important names to the ensemble, including Elisabeth Flickenschildt and Will Quadflieg. Despite all the successes, Gründgens surprisingly left the directorship in the fall of 1963:he needed a change. He died shortly thereafter, on the night of October 7, 1963.

Gründgens' "Hamburger Faust", which he adapted for the film in 1960, is still shown today occasionally in cinemas or on television. Gründgens himself plays his parade role, Mephisto - in the black and white mask that hasn't changed since the 1930s.