Page - 87 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

87 Lazarus’s necropolitical afterlife Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi and Reigen [La Ronde]. It also featured prestigious guest performances by a who’s who of the Berlin theatrical world, such as Fritzi Massary, Asta Niels- en, Elisabeth Bergner, Adele Sandrock, Curt Goetz, Heinz Rüh- mann, Conrad Veidt, Fritz Kortner, Paul Wegener, and Emile Jannings starring in Gerhart Hauptmann’s Fuhrmann Henschel [Drayman Henschel]. Rudolph Beer, who served as Director from 1924 to 1932, was even able to secure Moscow’s Kam- mertheater under the direction of Alexander Tairoff to perform Giroflé-Girofla. During the Nazi period, the Volks theater dar- ingly offered theatrical resistance in performances of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan and Ferdinand Raimund’s Der Diamant des Geisterkönigs [The Ghost-King’s Diamond]. Director Walter Bruno Iltz, who had already crossed swords with the Nazis dur- ing his decade as General Director of Düsseldorf’s public stages from 1927–37 and been denied membership in the party due to his “liberal-Marxist attitude,” used the theater to protect vulner- able actors and artists. After the war, the theater continued with its revolutionary modern repertoire. Despite the fact it was in the American sector, it put on neglected Russian dramatists, such as Alexan- der Ostrovsky, Ivan Turgenev and Anatoly Lunacharsky. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1955, it came to be called “the bravest theater in Vienna” for featuring the work of contemporary play- wrights such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sean O’Casey, Jean Cocteau, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Jean Anouilh, John Osborne, James Baldwin, Heinar Kipphardt, Friedrich Dür- renmatt, Max Frisch, and Václav Havel. It was the theater that in 1963 put an end to the decade-long, Burg theater-led “Brecht Boycott,” during which works by the playwright, who had been granted Austrian citizenship by the provincial Salzburg govern- ment in 1950 and who died in East Berlin in 1956, were discour- aged from being staged anywhere in Vienna.9 It was also the 9 Well-known writers Friedrich Torberg and Hans Weigel prominently ad- vocated against Brecht due to his communist ties. For example, in a speech