One of Stefan Brun’s earliest memories is of his grandfather putting on a puppet show in his folks’ living room in Munich. “There was a puppet here and a puppet here,” Brun says as he holds his hands up on either side of his face, “and his head was in the middle. He was a very funny, expressive man.”
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Brun’s grandfather was the German actor and director Fritz Kortner. During the days of the Weimar Republic, Kortner won accolades for his portrayals of Hamlet and Richard III, and he appeared in the first production of Bertolt Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities. But just as the Jewish actor began to break into films, the Nazis came to power. “My grandfather’s image was used by Goebbels as a symbol of the sort of horrible Semitic actor that they were trying to get rid of,” says Brun. His grandfather fled to America, where he passed the war in Hollywood. Eventually he returned to West Germany and became one of the country’s leading directors, diligently attempting to purge German theater of all traces of Nazi aesthetic: bombastic performances, stagy tableaux, the emphasis on spectacle.
But Brun’s big break came in 1987 when he was invited to intern at the Berliner Ensemble. Though he jumped at the job, his experiences were mixed. “They were doing great productions of Shakespeare–I loved their Troilus and Cressida–but their Brecht was hidebound and moldy. But the mood in East Germany was not good then. There was a general stagnation in the country.” Still Brun got to work with the company’s artistic director, playwright Heiner Muller (Hamletmachine).
“And here I am,” Brun says and smiles, almost ten years after leaving the U.S., “directing at the Prop and sleeping on a mattress in a corner of the office.”
