22 Facts About Erwin Piscator

Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator was a German theatre director and producer.

Erwin Friedrich Max Piscator was born on 17 December 1893 in the small Prussian village of Greifenstein-Ulm, the son of Carl Piscator, a merchant, and his wife Antonia Laparose.

Erwin Piscator's family was descended from Johannes Piscator, a Protestant theologian who produced an important translation of the Bible in 1600.

The family moved to the university town Marburg in 1899 where Piscator attended the Gymnasium Philippinum.

Erwin Piscator took Arthur Kutscher's famous seminar in theatre history, which Bertolt Brecht later attended.

Erwin Piscator began his acting career in the autumn of 1914, in small unpaid roles at the Munich Court Theatre, under the directorship of Ernst von Possart.

Erwin Piscator wrote a few bitter poems that were published in 1915 and 1916 in the left-wing Expressionist literary magazine Die Aktion.

In November 1918, when the armistice was declared, Erwin Piscator participated in the November Revolution, giving a speech in Hasselt at the first meeting of a revolutionary Soldiers' Council.

Erwin Piscator returned to Berlin and joined the newly formed Communist Party of Germany.

Erwin Piscator left briefly for Konigsberg, where he joined the Tribunal Theatre.

Erwin Piscator joined Hermann Schuller in establishing the Proletarian Theatre, Stage of the Revolutionary Workers of Greater Berlin.

In collaboration with writer Hans Jose Rehfisch, Erwin Piscator formed a theatre company in Berlin at the Comedy-Theater on Alte Jacobsstrasse, following the Volksbuhne concept.

Erwin Piscator used mechanized sets, lectures, movies, and mechanical devices that appealed to his audiences.

Erwin Piscator made extensive cuts to the text and reinterpreted the play as a vehicle for his political beliefs.

Erwin Piscator presented the protagonist Karl Moor as a substantially self-absorbed insurgent.

Erwin Piscator founded the influential Erwin Piscator-Buhne in Berlin in 1927.

In 1929 Erwin Piscator published his The Political Theatre, discussions of the theory of theatre.

In July 1936, Erwin Piscator left the Soviet Union for France.

Erwin Piscator was elected a corresponding member of the East German Academy of Arts in 1956, one of the few West Germans to have this position.

In 1962 Erwin Piscator was appointed manager and director of the Freie Volksbuhne in West Berlin.

From 1962 on, Erwin Piscator produced several works that dealt with trying to come to terms with the Germans' Nazi past and other timely issues; he inspired mnemonic and documentary theatre in those years until his death.

In 2016, a Erwin Piscator monument was erected in his birthplace of Greifenstein-Ulm.