‘Here we have Gustaf Gründgens, the artist who is a stage actor, opera director, film actor and [...] film director. A person with a distinct personality, a Düsseldorfer who can do what he wants.’ – Gustaf Gründgens was one of the most prominent and controversial theatre and film personalities of the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and the Federal Republic of Germany. On the 125th anniversary of his birth, he gets a (no) hymn of praise.
Reading time: about 13 minutes
Prelude
Gustaf Gründgens was born Gustav Heinrich Arnold Gründgens in Düsseldorf on 22 December 1899. As a child, he wanted to be an oratorio singer or weigh soft soap before realising early on that he wanted to be nothing other than an actor. He was unable to shine either as a schoolboy or as a business apprentice, but his training with Gustav Lindemann and Louise Dumont at the Düsseldorf Academy of Dramatic Art was successful.
From 1921, the self-confident young actor wrote his name with an ‘f’ in his contract with the Vereinigte Städtische Bühnen zu Kiel. His career took him to the Städtische Kurtheater Eckernförde and the Hamburg Kammerspiele, where he met the Mann siblings, which not only led to his divorce from Erika Mann in 1929, but also to Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto, for whose main character Hendrik Höfgen Mann took Gründgens as a role model and portrayed him as an opportunistic careerist under the Nazis.
The novel was first published in 1936 by the exile publisher Querido in Amsterdam. The work was banned in the ‘Third Reich’ and Gründgens‘ partner and adoptive son and legal successor Peter Gründgens-Gorski successfully prevented its publication in the Federal Republic of Germany after Gründgens’ death by taking legal action, as the novel also violated Gründgens' personal rights posthumously.
In 1928, Gründgens gained a foothold in Berlin, playing the young-men-seducing blackmailer Ottfried von Wieg in Ferdinand Bruckner's Die Verbrecher at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater. Although the engagement led to a high level of fame, it also led to typecasting, which fixed him to a certain type of role and labelled him a villain. This was reinforced by the medium of film.
Gründgens explained in 1963: ‘And then [with Max Reinhardt] I ended up in a series of salon plays that labelled me. Then came the coincidence of a film like M and suddenly I only saw myself in leather coats with a bomb on my head as a crook and said ‘Stop’, so that's no longer true at all.’
Despite his subjective aversion to this type of role, he remains unforgotten as the hustler in Fritz Lang's film M (D 1931), which was inspired by the criminalist Ernst Gennat and members of the Berliner Ringvereine such as Adolf Leib - known as Muskel-Adolf. The latter is said to have only seen a ‘Männeken’ in Gründgens on the set.
Gründgens' preferences lay elsewhere, his heart beat for classical roles, especially Hamlet. He also played his favourite role, Goethe's Mephisto, hundreds of times in his life. Despite his scepticism towards the medium of film, he considered the work to be a ‘brilliant script’ and captured it on celluloid in 1960 as his last cinematic work, so that his face in the unmistakable mask is still familiar today.
After meeting him on the film set, Gertrud Stolte-Adell said: ‘No, it's not a glowing-eyed evil man who reeks of sulphur and makes you look at the horse's foot - it's a very elegant gentleman with a slightly slipped savoir vivre, sometimes even a harlequin, agile in dance, graceful, admittedly completely without innocence, in any case a feast for the eyes, on which even the gaze of the orthodox lingers reluctantly, but nevertheless gladly.’
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With these devilries, he already had his final breakthrough in Berlin in 1932, his Mephisto in Lothar Müthel's production of Faust I was an outstanding success and his name was on everyone's lips. He continued his career under the National Socialists, becoming General Director, Prussian State Showman, Presidential Councillor of the Reich Theatre Chamber, Reich Senator for Culture and State Councillor.
Gründgens, who stood up for persecuted colleagues such as Ernst Busch or Erich Zacharias-Langhans, supported the Nazi regime on a cultural level, even though he himself was endangered at times due to his homosexual relationships. In his diary entry from 21 January 1938, Joseph Goebbels described the entire ‘Gründgens-Laden [as] completely gay’, wrote that his fingers were tingling to do something about it and on 19 August 1941, the following can be read in his diary: ‘The Führer doesn't like Gustaf Gründgens. He is too unmanly for him. His opinion is that homosexuality must not be tolerated in public life under any circumstances.’
Nevertheless, propaganda activities such as guest performances abroad in Denmark, Austria, Holland and Norway and films such as Das Mädchen Johanna, Ohm Krüger and Hundert Tage, based on the play Campo di maggio by Benito Mussolini and Giovacchino Forzano, were an inseparable part of Gründgens' biography. He supported the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany and was at least one of the voices calling on the people in newspapers to vote ‘yes’ in the referendum that was to take place later and officially legitimise Hitler's actions. Magazines that contained anything unfavourable about Gründgens were confiscated at the behest of the Gestapo. His networks and his position within the ‘Third Reich’ precluded any criticism of his person.
Gründgens, who was released from the Soviet special camp in Jamlitz on 9 March 1946 after 9 months in prison, was back on the stage of the Deutsches Theater just two months later, on 3 May 1946, in the role of Christian Maske in Sternheim's The Snob - tickets were sold out. In Berlin, his activities were initially categorised as incriminating, so that he was only allowed to work as an actor and not as a director or artistic director. The commission in Düsseldorf, on the other hand, categorised him as incriminated - the British military government disagreed and saw him as a fellow traveller. Gründgens refused to put up with this, and in 1948 an appeal process led to him finally being deemed incriminated and his career being able to resume full speed ahead.
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Gründgens negated, glossed over and omitted, not only with regard to himself. Among others, he supported Fritz Hippler, who had already joined the NSDAP in 1927 and made the lurid smear film The Eternal Jew in 1940, as well as Emmy Göring, wife of his protector Hermann Göring. He liked to ignore problematic issues, but he was far from alone in this; the exonerating narratives served both sides as required.
Gründgens took over the directorship of the Städtische Bühnen Düsseldorf and the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in March 1947 - although he was not fully ‘denazified’ until 1948. In May 1955, he became general director of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. He filled the houses wherever he performed and was the first artist in the Federal Republic of Germany to be awarded the Grand Cross of Merit with Star by Federal President Theodor Heuss. Heuss emphasised that Gründgens was being honoured both as a person and as an artist, while at the same time paying tribute to the art of acting.
With his Faust, Gründgens made it to Edinburgh, Moscow and New York, among other places, although the critical voices abroad were much louder than those at home. At the Edinburgh International Festival in 1949 in particular, people were not happy about the appearance of ‘Hitler's “Senator of Culture” and Goering's friend’ and wished: ‘Send him home!’. Shortly before his death, Gründgens recapitulated in an interview with Günter Gaus, almost defensively, that neither ‘being a child of fortune’ nor his career had fallen into his lap, that he had had to pay heavily for it.
He was plagued by migraines from a young age and suffered from depression, loneliness, sleep and appetite disorders. He pulled the ripcord and resigned from the directorship at short notice in the summer of 1963. Gründgens, who was taking some time out, died unexpectedly on 7 October 1963 in Manila during a trip around the world. While rumours swirled about the circumstances of his death, with murder and suicide being discussed, the main cause was probably a stomach haemorrhage and its consequences for other organs. It was probably triggered by his high consumption of sleeping pills in combination with heat and stress.
125 years is a long time and Gründgens research has been active for decades in written, spoken and moving images, but there is still a lot to do. It will probably take many more years to critically scrutinise Gründgens' persona and his seemingly unshakeable career in detail. The decades-long influence of the actor, director and artistic director Gustaf Gründgens, who unquestionably possessed immense skill, on the German cultural and theatre landscape and the sometimes unreserved admiration of audiences and artists, who fade(ed) out everything delicate, still contains many aspects that are worth investigating in order to perhaps draw conclusions for the present.
This text was written in response to our call "Tell Us Your Stories!" in which we invite users to discover stories within our collections. With over 50 million objects now in the database of the German Digital Library, there is certainly much more to uncover that is worth telling and which we may have overlooked so far! Do you have an idea? Write to us at kommunikation [at] deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de (kommunikation[at]deutsche-digitale-bibliothek[dot]de)
Sources:
Rolf Badenhausen / Peter Gründgens-Gorski (Hg.): Gustaf Gründgens. Briefe, Aufsätze, Reden. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe 1967.
Thomas Blubacher: Gustaf Gründgens. Biographie. Leipzig: Henschel 2013.
Elke Fröhlich (Hg.): Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Teil I Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941. Band 5 Dezember 1937–Juli 1938, München: K. G. Saur 2000.
Elke Fröhlich (Hg.): Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Teil II Diktate 1941–1945. Band 1 Juli–September 1941, München [u. a.]: K. G. Saur 1996.
Kristina Höch: Gustaf Gründgens. Filmische Arbeiten 1930–1960, Marburg: Schüren 2023.
Franz K. Prosch: „Die Gräfin von Monte Christo“. In: Kleine Volks-Zeitung, 19.6.1938.
Gertrud Stolte-Adell: „Mephisto macht honneurs“. In: Film und Frau 14, 1960.
Dagmar Walach: Gustaf Gründgens. Aber ich habe nicht mein Gesicht – eine deutsche Karriere. Berlin: Henschel 1999.
o. V.: „Die vom Niederrhein“. In: Filmwelt 51, 1932.
Online Sources:
Berichte vom Tage. Gustaf Gründgens über den verfilmten Faust, 4.6.1960, NDR: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/berichte-vom-tage/gustaf-gruendgens-ueber-den-verfilmten-faust/ndr/Y3JpZDovL25kci5kZS8xNTFjMDY2NC1lMTRhLTRkMTctOTZjYy1mZWQyMzgxOWFhZDg
Zur Person – Gustaf Gründgens im Gespräch mit Günter Gaus, 10.7.1963, ZDF: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zur-person/gustaf-gruendgens-zeitgeschichte-archiv-zur-person-gaus-100.html
o. V.: „Deutsche Künstler und Künstlerinnen zur Volksabstimmung“. In: Bochumer Anzeiger, 9.4.1938: https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/newspaper/item/62E3SQ3JGFUSQLQIYEYFWKPWA4FTLTEQ?tx_dlf[highlight_word]=gr%C3%BCndgens&issuepage=26
o. V.: „Aus dem Tagesgeschehen", in: Honnefer Volkszeitung, 4.12.1953: https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/newspaper/item/47Y76ESB5NAZM7SHWCXIL2N76GAECG4O?issuepage=2
Kristina Höch: Gustaf Gründgens’ Schaffen in Salzburg und Wien. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Onlinepublikation, Wien: Filmarchiv Austria 2023:
https://www.filmarchiv.at/program/retrospective/gustaf-gruendgens/
