Kurt Hirschfeld
Kurt Hirschfeld ( born March 10, 1902 in Taught; † November 8, 1964 in Zurich ) was a German theater director and playwright in Zurich.
Life
Kurt Hirschfeld was born on March 10, 1902 as the son of the Jewish businessman Hermann Hirschfeld ( 1871-1941 ) and his wife Selma Allium ( 1877-1926 ), the daughter of a rabbi, in Taught.
He grew up in a religious family that was known in the town.
After attending secondary school in Taught Hirschfeld moved in 1914 to the grammar school at Aegidientorplatz in Hanover. Wrote early in the school and he has published poems and essays. Rather than participate in class, he read by its own account under the bank literatures, to which I certainly did not have access.
He studied philosophy, sociology, art history and German literature in Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Göttingen. From 1930 he worked as a dramaturge at the Hessian State Theatre in Darmstadt. His directorial debut was with Erich Kästner's life at this time.
After the takeover of the Nazi Party in 1933, Hirschfeld was dismissed. At first, he lived to be without registered, with friends in Berlin, he got an offer from the Director of the peacock stage in Zurich, Ferdinand Rieser, and emigrated to Switzerland. He lived after initial difficulties quickly, and through his work was from the provincial theater one of the most important German language theaters abroad.
1934 Hirschfeld was released, there had been differences of Rieser. From 1935 he worked as an editor in a publishing house, after that he went as a correspondent to Moscow. Here he found a job as an assistant, but he gave up when his colleague was arrested and shot by the Nazis. He went back to Switzerland, where he was involved in the rescue of the Schauspielhaus Zurich and there under Oskar Wälterlin as dramatic ( and from 1946 as Deputy Director ) worked. He directed, among others, Brecht Puntila and his Man Matti (premiered 1948), the Jungle of Cities (1960), O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1950), Sophocles' Oedipus the King (1954 ), Lessing's Emilia Galotti (1959 ), his Nathan the Wise ( 1964), TS Eliot's A deserved statesman (1960 ), Max Frisch's Andorra (premiered 1961) and Frank Wedekind's Lulu (1962).
1961 Hirschfeld became director of the Zurich Schauspielhaus Wälterlins after death. In 1962, he was honored in Hanover, Lower Saxony with the Great Cultural Award and directed Dürrenmatt's The Physicists at the local Ballhof.
Hirschfeld married in 1952 Tetta Scharff, daughter of the sculptor Edwin Scharff, a year later, his daughter Ruth was born. He died in 1964 at the age of 62 years to lung cancer in a sanatorium at Tegernsee.