Hirschfeld - Unbekannter Bekannter

Kurt Hirschfeld’s life exemplifies that of a committed 20th century intellectual. Born into a German-Jewish family, he became a successful dramaturge before fleeing the Nazis as a communist and a Jew. After Switzerland rejected him, he went to Moscow, working with Meyerhold and writing for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Escaping Stalin’s persecution, he eventually reached Zurich and joined the Schauspielhaus. There, exiled artists such as Bertolt Brecht and Therese Giehse made the theater a center of cultural resistance to fascism. After the war, it championed Frisch, Dürrenmatt and modern American writers. Largely forgotten today is the man instrumental in this legacy: Kurt Hirschfeld.