Mephisto

The last year of the world war and the year immediately following the November revolution in Russia were a great period for the avant-garde theatre in Germany, despite the country's severe economic difficulties. It was an excellent time, too, for the theatre director Oskar H Kroge, who ran a cellar theatre in Frankfurt-am-Main. In the highly charged intimacy of this narrow basement room the intellectual society of the city congregated, and a lively young audience was ever eager to discuss and applaud a new production of Wedekind or Strindberg, or the first night of play by such up-and-coming writers as Georg Kaiser, Carl Sternheim, Fritz von Unruh, Walter Hasenclever or Ernest Toller.

Oskar H Kroge himself wrote essays and elegiac odes, saw the theatre as a moral training ground: it was from the stage that a new generation would be won over to ideals which in the past men had believed were on the threshold of fulfilment - freedom, justice, peace. Oskar H Kroge was a solemn, trusting and naive man. On Sunday mornings before the performance of a play by Tolstoy or Rabindranath Tagore, he would make a speech to his audience. The word 'humanity' occurred frequently on these occasions.

Translated from German by Robin Smith