"Oskar Blumenthal and the Lessing Theater in Berlin, 1888-1904"

Oskar Blumenthal (1852-1917) was Berlin’s most feared theatre critic in the early years of the new German Reich. He had the audacity of referring to Goethe as “an egghead” who had no understanding of what made plays effective for audiences, and in other critiques he ridiculed Kleist, Hebbel, and other “important” playwrights—prompting an adversary publicly to call him a “one-man lynch mob.” In the 1880s Blumenthal himself began writing plays, and he was so successful that many self-appointed cultural guardians accused him of damaging the German theatre beyond repair. His became the most frequently performed plays on any German stage well into the new twentieth century, and when he built the Lessing Theater in 1888 he became a theatrical entrepreneur whose triumphs were unsurpassed. Then he leased the Lessing to the man who had criticized him most vociferously and general rejoicing followed “Bloody Oscar” into retirement. Extremely few since Oskar Blumenthal have matched his record as influential critic, successful playwright, and prosperous theatrical entrepreneur. Even fewer have any idea who he was, when he lived, or what he accomplished. Oskar Blumenthal was the most successful, the most frequently performed, the most envied, and probably the most hated theatre man of the Wilhelmine Era. He was born in Berlin on March 13, 1852, and twenty years later he earned a doctorate in German literature at the University of Leipzig. Within two years he became Feuilleton (an “arts and leisure” section) editor of the Berliner Tageblatt. At that newspaper he became the most widely read theatre critic in Berlin, where he presided as the city’s most feared critic, known within many theatre circles as “Bloody Oscar.” A good example of Blumenthal’s merciless appraisals is the night he and a companion attended the premiere of what both men considered a new play. The companion said he was “surprised the audience didn’t hiss the actors off the stage.” “Well,” Blumenthal said, “it’s difficult to yawn and hiss at the same time” (Hoffmeister 28). Blumenthal directed many of his most severe reviews at a Norwegian playwright who by the late 1870s was beginning to develop a reputation in Berlin, namely Henrik Ibsen. Blumenthal dismissed Ibsen’s innovative use of dramatic structure as “ornamental illustrations of the playwright’s perspicacity;” Ibsen’s interest in the inner tensions of character Blumenthal termed “psychological steeple chasing”(Blumenthal 112). Blumenthal liked “accessibility” in plot construction and character development. Anything inchoate or recondite he usually condemned in his reviews. That opinion placed Blumenthal at the opposite end of a cultural spectrum stretching all the way to a remote space occupied by the newspaper critic Otto Brahm (1856-1912) and his Freie Bühne organization. Brahm and his organization worked to subvert police censorship and present controversial plays that treated social problems. Brahm and his backers objected to Blumenthal’s plays, and most other contemporary German plays like them, because they offered “absolutely no way out of the problems of our contemporary world. The primary concern of the German theatre-goer has been is to amuse himself as much as possible.” Brahm indeed dismissed most popular German plays as “freshly baked goods that go stale almost as soon as they hit the shelves” (Brahm, Theater 257). Blumenthal, in contrast, felt that popular plays were the theatre’s life-blood.