Arnolt Bronnen (19 August 1895 – 12 October 1959) was an

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

playwright A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes play (theatre), plays, which are a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between Character (arts), characters and is intended for Theatre, theatrical performance rather than just Readin ...

and director.

Life and career

Bronnen was born in

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

, Austria, the son of the Austrian-Jewish writer Ferdinand Bronner and his Christian wife Martha Bronner. Bronnen's most famous play is the Expressionist drama ''

Parricide Parricide is the deliberate killing of one's own parent, spouse, child, or other close relative. However, the term is sometimes used more generally to refer to the intentional killing of a near relative. It is an umbrella term that can be used to ...

'' (''Vatermord'', 1922); its première production is notable, among other things, for being that from which Bronnen's friend, the young

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a p ...

in an early stage of his directing career, withdrew, after being taken to hospital with malnutrition and the actors of the cast, led by

Heinrich George Georg August Friedrich Hermann Schulz (9 October 1893 – 25 September 1946), better known as Heinrich George (), was a German stage and film actor. Early life George was born in Pomerania to August Friedrich Schulz, a former Deck Officer in t ...

, walked out on him.Willett and Manheim (1970, viii) and Thomson (1994, 26). According to ''The Cambridge Guide to Theatre'', the "erotic, anti-

bourgeois The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and Aristocracy (class), aristocracy. They are tradition ...

, black expressionism" of the play "caused a sensation" when it was eventually performed. Bronnen also wrote '' Birth of Youth'' (''Geburt der Jugend'', 1922) and '' Die Excesse'' (1923).Banham (1998, 132). After having collaborated on film treatments and various theatrical projects together, in 1923 Bronnen and Brecht co-directed a condensed version of ''Pastor Ephraim Magnus'' (a nihilistic, Expressionist play, according to ''The Cambridge Guide'', "stuffed with perversities and sado-masochistic motifs") by Hans Henny Jahnn.Banham (1998, 553), Sacks (1994, xviii), and Willett and Manheim (1970, viii). Later in his life he wrote reportage plays. Bronnen signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, a "vow of most faithful allegiance" to

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...

in 1933,88 "writers"
from ''Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-1949'', Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism 12, University of California Press 1998, , pp. 367–68. and was program director for the public TV station Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, but after the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

he became a

communist Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...

. Bronnen died of heart failure in

East Berlin East Berlin (; ) was the partially recognised capital city, capital of East Germany (GDR) from 1949 to 1990. From 1945, it was the Allied occupation zones in Germany, Soviet occupation sector of Berlin. The American, British, and French se ...

and is buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery.Taylor (1980
65
.

Selected filmography

* '' The Island of Tears'' (1923)

References

Sources

* Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. ''The Cambridge Guide to Theatre''. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. . * Sacks, Glendyr. 1994. "A Brecht Calendar." In ''The Cambridge Companion to Brecht''. Ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . pp. xvii–xxvii. * Taylor, Ronald. 1980. ''Literature and Society in Germany, 1918–1945''. Harvester studies in contemporary literature and culture 3. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press / Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble. . * Thomson, Peter. 1994. "Brecht's Lives." In ''The Cambridge Companion to Brecht''. Ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . p. 22–39. * Willett, John and Ralph Manheim. 1970. "Introduction." In ''Collected Plays: One'' by Bertolt Brecht. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose Ser. London: Methuen. . pp. vii–xvii. {{DEFAULTSORT:Bronnen, Arnolt 1895 births 1959 deaths Austrian male dramatists and playwrights Expressionist dramatists and playwrights Austrian male writers Modernist theatre Austrian theatre directors Austrian communists People from Krnov Writers from Vienna 20th-century Austrian dramatists and playwrights Austrian emigrants to East Germany Austrian people of Jewish descent