BY NOVEMBER 1932, the deteriorating political and social conditions of Berlin were leading our Troupe31 theater ensemble into a severe “program shortage” (führten damals jedoch zu einem Mangel an Programmen). Coming immediately off production of The Mousetrap and There Lies the Dog, the veterans of Troupe31 felt unable to write and produce a third stage work before early February. (This was the date that our director, Gustav von Wangenheim, had contracted with the theater at Schiffbauerdamm, near Friedrichstrasse.)

Our organisation was desperate for some new writer who could give us ready-made material for a solid proletarian-cultural (proletkult) production. Finding such a writer was a challenge, however, for several reasons:

1) The Nazis’ cultural black lists were causing a growing number of friends and allies to abandon Berlin. Several of own Troupe31 members already were being eyed by the police who, by now, were waiting for any excuse to arrest us on some new charge of cultural or political “conspiracy” and hustle us off to prison;

2) There was the usual lack of funding — now due, in part, to the lower purchase-power of the German mark against more powerful neighboring currencies, not to mention those of the United States and Great Britain. Troupe31 performances continued to be sold out, but most Berlin audience members could not afford to spend more than 50 Pfennig or a mark for a seat in our theater. All this meant that, in fall 1932, we could not afford to pay a new writer without cheating ourselves; and

3) As I’ve mentioned, we ourselves were exhausted from all the struggle of making hard-hitting political drama at high personal risk — and seeing little reward for it.

We had became numb with each new failing of the national government, watching it happen day-by-day. The German Republic had called no fewer than six elections that year, with new chancellors— Bruning, von Papen, Schleicher — being moved in and out of the position like pieces on a chessboard.

“We no longer have anything to lose,” we told each other. “If we don’t press the advantage of our popularity today, we will never get a second chance!”

We knew it was now or never. At the same time, nowhere could Troupe31 find new material for its next production — likely to be our final play.

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It began when one or two of us, Troupe31 actors (perhaps a little too eagerly) sneaked an early draft of There Lies the Dog into the hands of some theater friends. This proved to be a mistake; one that put our entire show-project in danger.

The drafted text fell into the hands of one of our theater “pals,” a fellow who was starting to write regularly for the Berliner Tagesblatt, a city newspaper. So, when this fellow got his hands on our script, he immediately “spilled the beans” in his daily.

What was worse, this would-be theater critic — young and somewhat amateurish, like ourselves — felt entitled to openly deride our still-unproduced and unfinished play. Peppering his text with some shockingly nationalist ideas, our “friendly” columnist predicted that “Troupe31’s There Lies the Dog is doomed to disaster.” And this before our troupe had even begun rehearsing the play! (I must also admit here, that this was by no means the only example of a betrayal of artists by a Berlin newspaper during these desperate times.)

At any time, of course, a theater company can expect criticism — predictably so, in the case of certain people or groups. What was now new, however, were the emerging critics who, for whatever reason, would willfully mis-interpret what they were seeing in our creative work — or, in this case, what they were disinclined to look at from the beginning. The mistaken release of the first draft of There Lies the Dog gave such critics an opportunity to blast away at us; we were very relieved, then, that no one else picked up on the Berliner Tagesblatt story, or that writer’s thread of discussion about our work.

At the time, however, we were terrified that this “gossip piece” had succeeded in lowering Berliners’ expectations for our second play — not just those who would never be inclined to see There Lies the Dog, but also our more steady friends and allies on the middle-left. Aside from raising the likelihood that we would sell fewer theater tickets, the words of the Berlin newspaper columist had suggested — and this was much more offensive to us — that our Troupe31 ensemble was not to be taken seriously. This offense to our work cannot be understated: Even if you are doing comedy, the worst thing in the world is not to be taken seriously by your own, knowing audience.

That year, when all of the city’s cultural institutions were in danger of being shut down, the smallest, stupidest criticism in the public media made you vulnerable. Several of us wondered whether anyone would come to see Here Lies the Dog, scheduled to open in the following weeks; others of us wondered whether we could open the show at all.

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Author’s Note: The musical intro to my ‘live reading’ Troupe31 podcasts, I’ve been using the fascinating work of Stefan Wolpe, who (as a 20-year-old composer with a future in NYC) made music/sound for Troupe31 shows. Wolpe plays a role in my unsold book-length nonfiction: “The Will to Style: Radical Utopians of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919-1925.”

After all the stress and hard labor, we took our second play onstage that summer — “There Lies the Dog” (Da Liegt der Hund Begraben). Our comrade Kurt Trepte played one lead, “Herr Nottebohm,” a wealthy German chain-store owner traveling in the Far East. Herr Nottebohm finds himself on the sunny deck of a luxury liner, off the coast of Shanghai, where he meets his German military counterpart — “Baron Gründern.” The two are reclined in deck chairs beneath a bright Oriental sun, with the vast and calm East China Sea lapping at the sides of their ship. The whole scene was a luxurious dream-image of the Orient, such as we might see in a colorfully drawn magazine illustration.

Played by the talented Heinrich Greif, Baron Gründern was a cagey German intelligence officer. While sharing little of himself, the Baron agrees often with his conversation partner, Nottebohm, the private business man. Standing behind the two is my character, Wittchen — a tourguide of sorts. Wittchen acts as a foil (and go-between) for these two other characters.

Each of these world-traveling personalities was much more wealthy than anyone in previous Troupe31 shows. Thus, “There Lies the Dog” required higher production values, its staging being rich with ornamentation. Our costumes also contributed to the fantastical atmosphere (including a delicious dress from Paris, of genuine silk). The whole show was very effective in transporting our audiences far away from our own gray Berlin.

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In early 1932, Troupe31 allowed itself to get diverted from its mission. Several meetings that should have been more focused devolved into petty arguments about “true authorship” and about how our actors’ collective should begin the work of developing material for the next play.

Our colleague Franz Friedrich and a couple of others wanted to write a different kind of play than our director, Gustav von Wangenheim, had been planning with two other lead actors, Kurt Trepte and Heinrich Greif. (I ended up alongside these two, as a third point of their onstage “triangle,” playing a character named ‘Wittchen’.) While the three of them were already deeply engaged with this play, Franz believed our next work should come down firmly on the side of the Berlin Transit Workers union.

“Our next work should reveal the unfair labor conditions of Berlin streetcar drivers and mechanics!” Franz argued.

“People will not pay to see a story in the theater that they can read in The Red Banner,” said Kurt — a clear swipe at Franz’s allegiance to the German Communist Party (KPD) and its political mouthpiece, die Rote Fahne.

Contrary to what you might have read in the newspapers, only a couple of our Troupe31 actors were KPD members. More than anyone, however, Franz “towed the line” for the Leninists who struggled, then as now, to determine what was “proper” revolutionary theater or true “proletarian culture” (Proletkult). Our German Bolshevics, in other words, had been “the deciders” on “true” revolutionary art for the past decade, telling the rest of us (ad nauseum) how art must genuinely commemorate the “great victories of our Russian comrades” on the “glorious battlefields” of their “legendary past.”

‘The pro-Russian Leninists are similar to our German Nationalists. Each have their own hierarchy — two political religions. And neither supports our most creative Berliners who, even as they go underground, embody a very different kind of Revolution — a Revolution of Everyday Life.’

From our more independent viewpoint, however, the pro-Russian Leninists are very much like the German Nationalists who are now taking power. Each ideology, after all, has its own hierarchy — each becoming an exclusive political religion. Both — Communism and Nationalism — require some brand of loyalist “belief” and, consequently, demand ideological and behavioral homogeneity among the people. (Beide verlangen ihre eigene Form des ‘wahren Glaubens’ – und die darausfolgende ideologische und verhaltensbezogene Gleichschaltung.)

Neither the polemical Communist nor the iron-fisted Nationalist is very supportive of our most creative Berliners, of course. Going underground, our own “radical” friends continue to do what they can for a very different kind of Revolution; one that is more spontaneous and joyful one; a celebratory Revolution of Everyday Life, if you will….

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Troupe31 actor Heinrich Greif is the rebellious son of a Dresden postal clerk. In secondary school Heinrich published a satirical student newspaper, Die Neuling (The Amateur). It made something of a splash among his friends and instructors. I don’t know much more about Heinrich’s past than this.

In our first Troupe31 stage production, The Mousetrap, Heinrich played a relatively minor role. We didn’t see or hear much of him before 1932, when we began work on our second production. That being said, a lot was going on behind Heinrich’s inscrutable mask; our director, Gustav von Wangenheim, was the first to spot it.

“Heinrich Greif is just crackling beneath the surface,” Gustav told me one evening. “I believe he’s something of a volcano — waiting to explode. Did you know he writes poetry?”

I didn’t.

For us, his colleagues, Greif generally showed a calm exterior. His thinking and writing, however, was that of an artist engaged in a constant struggle to keep himself under control. Self-discipline is a skill all of us intellectual workers (geistige Arbeiter) need today. Since last year, when the Nazis took the government here, we’ve all learned to act in certain ways — so as to better conform to the new profile of a “good German,” for example — while quietly becoming something else entirely.

We’ve all learned to act in certain ways, so as to better conform to the regime’s official profile of a “good German.” At the same time, we are quietly becoming something else entirely.

“Who among us can claim to be a truly perfect German?” Gustav asked a small group, gathered in his apartment one night. Heinrich Greif spoke up.

“There is, of course, only one perr-fect German, my dear Herr von Wangenheim!” the actor said, rolling his rrr’s grandly. “At that is the little Austrian colonel at the top!” (Aber natürlich gibt es nur einen perr-fekten Deutscher, lieber Herr v. Wangenheim! Und das ist der kleine Österreicher, ganz oben!)

When the laughter died down, the three of them — Gustav, Heinrich, and Kurt Trepte — went to work, plotting characters and scenes for our next show.

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AS BACKGROUND to our troubles of 1932, I want to tell about another conflict that divided Troupe31’s predecessor — the original Troupe — organised in 1921 by the well-known Austrian stage director Berthold Viertel.

In establishing the Troupe 1921 (die Truppe), Viertel had been inspired by two great Russian theater ensembles — Stanislavski’s Moscow Artists’ Theater and the Moscow Chamber Theater under the direction of Alexander Jakovlevitch Tairov. Viertel planned for his own actors troupe to present modernist playwrights of the time, writers like Georg Kaiser, Robert Musil, John M. Synge, Knut Hamsun, and Frank Wedekind, among others.

Viertel quickly signed his friend and colleague Fritz Kortner, an Austrian actor who had played at the Free People’s Theater (Freie Volksbühne) in Vienna. Kortner, who was Jewish, was eager to play Shylock in Viertel’s 1923 production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. (The cast also included Rudolph Forster as Antonio, and Johanna Hofer, as Portia.)

Cinema and the ensuing “star system” threatened to crush our real-life theater ensembles. Following other actors collectives, director Gustav von Wangenheim established our Troupe31 in response to the ‘star system’ of Berlin’s growing film industry.

Fritz Kortner is well-known for his astonishing career in the German theater and film, playing title roles in pictures like “Danton,” “The Life of Beethoven,” and “Brothers Karamazov.” Kortner was so well-known for his films, in fact, his appearance in any Berlin stage production practically guaranteed a packed house for the entire run of any show. This was due to the “star effect” of leading film actors, first observed in our Berlin theaters during the early 1920s.

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OUR PROBLEMS began during the first couple of weeks of performing The Mousetrap in Berlin. After investing so much energy into creating our successful ‘hit’ play, the members of Troupe31 had stopped getting together for rehearsals. We saw each other only in the context of the performances themselves.

The Mousetrap was playing to enthusiastic sold-out houses and, as a result, each member of our collective was being getting about eight marks a day. Later in the year, inflation hit us again; for now, however, it was a great relief for us, finally, to be earning money for our work.

For all this, however, we were restless. After the first week of shows, all the excitement and media attention had died down, and — as our experienced director had predicted — without a new production to develop, the members of Troupe31 were getting bored.

Franz Friedrich raised the first issue one evening, as we were sitting around our regular table at Zum Nolle. Why did all the Mousetrap programs and playbills credit Gustav von Wangenheim, our director, for authoring the show?

“After all the research we did to create our own characters,” asked Franz, “don’t we deserve some of the glory?”

I must admit that, at the time, I agreed with him. And I wasn’t the only one. It was an issue that went straight to our egos — to our weighty actors’ egos. Gustav was also there with us. He thought about the question a moment. Franz’s challenge to our vanity might have been resolved quickly. If only this issue of writing credit had been the only one….

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EVERYONE today can see how Germany has been shaped by its 100-year-old “Youth Associations” movement (Bündische Jugend). Differing from one state to the next, these traditional groups have encouraged young German men and women to join together in outdoor activity — hiking, sports, summer camping and so on. As with most things today, however: There is also a dark side.

Each generation of the movement has produced a certain kind of health-conscious German, both male and female. On the one hand, the youth/naturist movement has improved general health and has helped to establish remarkably strong bonds among young Germans. Over time, however, these groups can usher us into a strange performative conformity. In the hands of abusive group leaders, we see less empowerment of young Germans (as stronger individuals) and more of the opposite: Legions of youngsters who’ve been “whipped into shape,” stewing in caldrons of quiet misery, leading into extremist ideological thinking — or non-thinking, as the case may be.

When this happens, our young people are burdened with a sense of deep isolation, regardless of the degree to which they feel they “belong” to the Bündische Jugend — or to its leadership. “Heil dir im Siegerkranz,” and so on.

‘The Bündische Jugend movement seduces our young people into social conformity; at the same time, they have a greater sense of isolation and alienation from others — even as they pledge allegiance to it together.’

During the past decade or so, the German Youth Movement has become a conduit (especially, for young men) to make themselves “fit” for national service and, starting at a very young age, to receive high-disciplined training for the German Army (Reichswehr). Now, with religious fervour, the National Socialists have been able to co-opt our pro-nature, pro-outdoor-activity youth movement for the “greater national cause” of their Nazi Party.

The right-wing extremists’ strange religious zealotry is moving beyond athletic fitness, as a goal, and preaching to young people that their principal objective should be “winning” — the old, familiar sermon of nationalist German “victory.” (“Sieg!”). Thus, the Nazis’ meddling in our once-innocent Scouting Movement has transformed it into something ominous; something anti-social and very unhealthy indeed.

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With the success of The Mousetrap, Troupe31 gathered a strong, new energy that summer of 1932 — and ran with it. Especially electrifying was the involvement of theater-union leader Hans Otto, who used our play to make his stunning and effective appeal for greater cooperation between Berlin’s most radical union workers and the mainstream majority Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Our comrade Franz Friedrich (playing ‘Mephistopheles’ in The Mousetrap) was especially inspired.

“Let’s create a revolutionary leader for our next production!” Franz grinned. “What do you say, Kurt?”

Often cast in leading roles, Kurt Trepte gave the matter some thought before responding.

“Given today’s reality,” Kurt said, “we’d have to make any revolutionary leader a martyr in the end. He would have to die for his cause.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Franz shrugged. “Someone must speak boldy for the revolution, no matter the cost!”

Franz was speaking from the heart — but our circumstances were rather dire, even in 1931. All of us could see how Berlin was becoming a harder, less-friendly place. Few other companies were attempting the kind of political theater that were doing, and many of our colleagues were fleeing the city. We bemoaned this fact to each other every day. After all, who wants to be the only acting troupe doing highly political theater? Or, as Kurt expressed it: “What good is it to be a single bright star in the otherwise empty sky?”

Now, with others leaving, our success was drawing the attention of the fascists. Strangers began to confront us that summer, trying to undermine our success or reduce our appeal.

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In creating and performing The Mousetrap, as I’ve said, our principal goal was to cast light upon the worsening labor conditions and utter poverty being faced by many, many Germans today. Further, we wanted to show how these conditions are being exploited and worsened by the ongoing and needless politicization of the Nationalists.

Since 1929, at least, the Nazis have been making their political attacks against organizations of poor and working-class industrial laborers; also against those working in the ‘knowledge fields’ — most obviously against “foreigners” and Jews; also against teachers, doctors, musicians, writers, those of us in entertainment, and so on. Today, in summer 1934, we’re not seeing their Nationalist-government’s policies making things better for anyone; only for themselves, sitting at the top of the heap.

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After playing almost a year in Berlin, Troupe31 took the “The Mousetrap” on tour, doing limited runs in four different German cities during the second half of 1932. (These were bookings we’d been able to arrange with our slimmed-down “whistle stop” promotion tour, the previous winter.) The big tour with the entire troupe taught us a lot about audiences in other German states, outside of Berlin. We took the play to Stuttgart, for example, where the responses of our audiences were especially memorable — immediate and clear.

We staged these Stuttgart shows before a thousand or more unemployed workers, who attended together with most, if not all, of the city’s public-service employees. (These crowds were, in turn, supplemented by several hundred people who came in from the surrounding rural areas.) Hungry for our kind of entertainment, these folks packed themselves into the Stuttgart theater for several nights, challenging civil authorities — because the place had seating for only 700.

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Soon after the Berlin premiere of The Mousetrap, Troupe31 began planning two “audition tours,” specifically to show our longtime work in other German cities. Our plan was to make a single painted ‘scene-flat’ and to take it — along with its rigging and a few props of hand-painted cardboard — all easily packed for travel. Make-up and costumes — just three or four of them — would fit into a single trunk.

As planned, the whole thing turned out to be a boon for busy stage managers in Dresden and elsewhere. All of them appreciated the fact of having to hire extra “hands” to assist us with our performance. The owners also were happy to invite certain friends of the local press — largely journalists we had on our list of Potential Allies. As a result, everyone involved could easily envision countless eventual bookings and performances in the German world “beyond Berlin.” Twice that summer, Troupe31 dusted-off its travel kits and, towing along one single suitcase and steamer trunk, we took our traveling version of The Mousetrap on the road. Through both tours, the ensemble was quickly able to show German venue-managers and their local “scribblers” something of what Troupe31 had been “cooking up” in Berlin.

“Berlin is an ever-moving Soul-scape. An individual’s pathology must always be understood and expressed as a collective problem."

All through February 1932, we continued to perform The Mousetrap, drawing enthusiastic full-house crowds at the Kammerspiele. By this time, we were doing the show with consistently good sense, growing more confident with each new audience. Many people came backstage or even to the backstage door, eager to tell us how the play had inspired them. This began a new nightly ritual for us: the conversations we held following each performance.

We quickly learned to take the discussion to the Zur Nolle restaurant, where people, generally, knew they could find us. (Sometimes, they were happy to pay something for our food and drinks.) One night, we were seated at Zur Nolle, when Gustav saw a new guest. Jumping up, he greeted and pumped the hand of the accomplished writer, Alfred Döblin.

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The momentum of the party, that night’s celebration of The Mousetrap’s premiere, carried us — or a few of us, anyway — into the next morning. Having worked all year, we’d made a play (from scratch) that showed our collective, Troupe31, to be a beautiful, collaborative machine; casting ourselves as its thinking, moving parts. This was the night in which our “machine,” if you will, was finally able to let off some steam.

We carried-on, as only actors can, at Cafe Zum Nolle, partying late among scores of friends, new fans, and colleagues, all of us supported by those (too-few!) patrons who bought us the drinks and cigarettes. Rising around noon the next day, our ears still rang with all the noise of the nighttime fun; and also with the sound of the audience’s enthusiastic applause. The following days were brightened as we opened the newspapers — most notably, perhaps, an issue of the Berliner Courier where theater-critic Herbert lhering praised our production of The Mousetrap under a two-word headline: “Courageous Actors!”

All to say: We’d done it.

Before long, the entire city would be reading something about Troupe31 and The Mousetrap — with countless theater-goers inspired to get their hands on a ticket to see the show for themselves.

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Wieland Herzfelde, the publisher at Malik Press, was happy to accept an invitation to tea by Gustav von Wangenheim, the actor and theater director of our own Troupe 1931. Wieland Herzfelde knocked on Gustav’s door two days after seeing one of our pre-season open rehearsals of The Mousetrap with other friends in the Berlin theater and press.

Then, as now, Wieland was a balding fellow in his mid-30s. Although it was an informal meeting and they had long been friends, Wieland (like Gustav) wore a suit and tie. (Being invited to participate, to observe, and to take notes of the conversation, I — Ingeborg Franke — wore a business shirt, vest, and pants.)

Almost as soon as we sat down, Wieland began describing — for my benefit — the origins of a journal he’d published more than ten years ago, called Pleite (‘Flat Broke’). Herzfelde said he had “big hopes” for wide circulation of this new German literary work and its illustrations; Pleite was to be both artistic and forward-thinking, both culturally and politically.

“We wanted to make it cheap — newspaper-tabloid-style,” Wieland remembered. “The make-up included all kinds of new typographical innovations, including my brother’s work.” (Wieland’s brother, Helmut Herzfelde, is a graphic artist everyone knows today as “John Heartfield.”)

“It’s a brave publication — but that was a different time,” said Gustav von Wangenheim. “Somehow, Berliners — and Germans, generally — have been steadily losing heart since 1919…..”

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On a hill overlooking Weimar’s vast and beautiful historic public parkland, the staff and students of the Bauhaus State School designed and built a model low-cost house for the school’s 1923 Exhibition — a genuine, middle-class home-of-the-future.

The building was a low, white one-story residence that its designers hoped would give visiting guests a glimpse into new ways of using current technological advances in design and construction — perhaps toward producing buildings full of such apartments, where the “everyman” worker and their family might live, in some peaceful, modern community.

Led by instructor Georg Muche, who was then teaching Johannes Itten’s Introductory Course, the students took just four months to build the model “Haus am Horn.”

Laid-out around a large central “living room” (or salon), the building’s other spaces were conceived according to some sense of their individual function(s); there was a sizeable kitchen, a small dining room, a child’s bedroom, and separate bedrooms for “Herr und Dame,” each having its own work- or desk-space — a very Modern idea.

Bauhaus workshops were responsible for the Haus am Horn’s designed furnishings — including rugs by Gunta Stölzl, with much of the cabinetry, tables, chairs, etc. by students Marcel Breuer and Erich Diekmann. Benita Otte and Ernst Gebhardt fitted the kitchen work spaces with efficient storage, easy-care acrylic countertops, and the latest appliances. Adorned with all these Modern conveniences, Haus am Horn and the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar gave its thousands of visitors (and countless tourists since) a then-unparalleled view of “Life in the Future.”

Unfortunately, in 1923, the Bauhaus School still had more than its fair share of critics. As ever, the school’s enemies were eager to see it all fail. In anticipation of that year’s exposition, even as director Walter Gropius and the Bauhäuslers worked to draw international support and attention for their work, its Weimar and German nay-sayers wasted no opportunity to dump ridicule on it. The perennial anti-Bauhaus detractors said the model Haus am Horn was exactly that — a self-serving model or demonstration of Modern for its own sake. These unusual living quarters were neither very realistic nor especially practical for many German families of the day, the German traditionalists said.

Gropius, his staff and students were hard-put to win supporters. Even pro-Bauhaus publicist Bruno Adler — whom Gropius trusted, more often than not — was sparing in his praise for the “House of the Future.” Writing in the Jena-based newspaper Das Volk, Adler complained that, like other parts of the larger exhibition, the Haus am Horn did not come across as a coherent, collaborative product of solid, well-grounded students. The project lacked the sense of cooperation, according to Adler. It didn’t seem to be the product of a creative group working in close collaboration with their instructors — all equally driven by society’s desperate need for practical and inexpensive housing.

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During the final ten days before premiering our first play, The Mousetrap, Troupe31 staged two dressed rehearsals before several hundred of our invited guests — mostly friends and colleagues in Berlin’s own arts and entertainment community.

We were especially careful in picking these “first critics” of our production, wanting a mix of spectators from different social classes and professions — including theater managers who might want to pick up the show when our engagement ran out at Max Reinhardt’s Kammerspiele.

On the guest lists for these two shows: At least twenty Berlin “Scribblers” — writers and critics for our most influential social- and cultural publications. Naturally, we tried to appeal to members of the Berliner Literari who identify (even today) with different social and political factions. On the political spectrum, these ranged from the middle-of-the-road Social Democrats to the Independent Socialists, the unapologetically far-left Bolshevists and the persistently dogmatic Leninists. [We do not count members of the Unanchored Levitational Party (Levitationspartei ohne Verankerung) and dada-loving anarchists. (These believe themselves able to see everything from a thousand feet up, in the clouds.)]

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After Gustav von Wangenheim had made one “final round” of changes to The Mousetrap, Troupe31 plunged itself into the last phase of the play’s production: We started rehearsing in the actual theater, with the dressed and technical rehearsals, beginning the last week of November 1931.

By this time, all the intense work we’d already invested in the play enabled it to stand very well on its own.

“It has its legs,” as we told our curious friends.

This was at the end of November, the final rehearsals running for about three weeks, at the theater — Max Reinhardt’s smaller Kammerspiele room, adjacent to his grander Deutsches Theater. Our discussions of the work were ongoing. Even as we donned our costumes and makeup on that first night of working under the spotlights, the actors and the director of Troupe31 still were second-guessing double- and triple-meanings of certain lines in the play.

“I think it means this and that you should play it that way” — and so on.

As opening night drew closer, the more fervently we discussed our own and each other’s work. Both new and old conversations threatened to re-open the more intense discussions that came alongside bad memories and old wounds….

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WE BEGAN rehearsal of “The Mousetrap” on August 28, 1931, and practiced — working through the play, every other night or so, for about twelve weeks. By German standards, three months is a very long time to rehearse a single show. This was necessary for Troupe31, however, because we were all doing so many other things, both within and outside our own organisation.

Like getting through university, it became our “trial by fire.” Technically, we were employed as actors, and yet each of us was burdened by an overwhelming number of new and different responsibilities. There was no question that, sooner or later, we’d be making dreadful errors. Gustav Von Wangenheim reassured us on this point, however.

“Yes, we will have to admit that, under the circumstances, we are still amateurs,” the director said. “But memory of this shall pass. You needn’t worry too much about the little slips and falls along the way.”

In this way, our beloved theater director and producer, Gustav von Wangenheim, freed the members of Troupe31 to make our own mistakes — and to learn from them.

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WE’VE written here about how director Gustav von Wangenheim told us about the danger of epater le bourgeois — of challenging audiences too heavily with a certain intensity or tone of revolutionary narrative. In a later session, von Wangenheim described another trick of theater composition, this one borrowed from filmmakers: something called “dialectical montage.”

In its simplest manifestation, dialectical montage describes a sequence of two or more scenes in a play (or a film) that — when placed in juxtaposition with each other — introduce or infer an “invisible” third element or a completely independent idea.1

“Part of a modern film director’s work,” Gustav Wangenheim tells us, “is helping the audience to make meaningful connections from one scene to the next. We do this by intentionally placing different scenes and dialog against each other. Different arrangements or montages of various scenes inspire new ideas in different ways.”

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In beginning work on our first play, The Mousetrap, we — actors of Troupe31 — were encouraged to talk to real employees and managers of Berlin shoe factories and learn about their lives and labor. From this, we sketched a more specific and intimate understanding of our own characters in the drama we were producing.

At the same time, we had countless discussions among ourselves about their everyday work issues, asking ourselves — as activists, actors, and writers, as “intellectual labor,” or “knowledge workers” (geistige Arbeiter): How might we behave, both collectively and as individuals, under the same or similar circumstances as these industrial workers faced?

Empathetic human-knowledge work, our ‘intellectual labor,’ lies at the heart of our success as Troupe31 and the production of revolutionary theater in Berlin.

In creating the environment of the factory for the stage, our theater collective was able to convey new, real-world clarity. The intellectual labor did not come easily for us — it was humbling — but it made Troupe31 a much better theater company, and it made “The Mousetrap” a much more powerful play. Today, we are convinced that this empathetic human-knowledge work — our intellectual labor (geistige Arbeit) — lies at the heart of our success as Troupe31, and the production of revolutionary theater in Berlin.

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