“Theatre is more beautiful than war” – an obituary for Claus Peymann

Toward the end of his long life, Claus Peymann enjoyed playing the court theater jester. Dressed in a black habit that gave him the appearance of a high priest, he cheerfully and unashamedly lashed out at God and the world. He had always done that, of course. But suddenly, his tirade and the anger he displayed seemed a bit sad.

During his heyday in Vienna or Berlin, Claus Peymann rarely missed an opportunity to rant and rave and rarely slipped up. His intensive directing work always had to be accompanied by commentary on the uneasy times in general and on crises in the theater industry in particular.

In a legendary 1988 interview with André Müller for the "Zeit" newspaper, shortly after becoming director of the Burgtheater, he said: "If you only knew what shit I'm experiencing here! Christo would have to cover up this theater and tear it down. Maybe I'll throw everything away tomorrow. Austrian Chancellor Vranitzky has just submitted a resignation letter."

Of course, he didn't quit, and the Chancellor probably never received any mail from Peymann, but the verbose, endlessly exaggerated chatter, peppered with gutter jargon, was part of the craft of this refined mind, which sometimes lacked finesse.

Peymann saw himself as a solitary figure in a confusing and, for his taste, overpopulated theater landscape. If it had been up to him, he would have been sufficient, along with two or three poets and a small group of actors. Among the authors was Thomas Bernhard, whose play titles "Theatermacher" (Theater Maker) and "Weltverbesserer" (Do-Gooder) were a perfect fit for Peymann.

Peter Handke was also important to him, paving his way into the theater with his world premiere productions ("Audience Insult," "Kaspar"). Ultimately, his reverence was extended to Kleist, Shakespeare, Goethe—or Eugène Ionosco, whose work no one else wanted to perform. And without great actors like Kirsten Dene, Ilse Ritter, Gert Voss, or Bernhard Minetti, the proud egomaniac himself had to admit, he would never have become what he was.

Born on June 7, 1937, in Bremen, the son of a teacher, Claus Peymann studied German and theater studies and began his stage work at the University Theater in Hamburg. He then moved to Heidelberg, caused a stir at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt with Handke's early plays, and in 1970 came to the Schaubühne in Berlin, where he fell out with Peter Stein, who introduced a democratic right of co-determination at the theater.

Even these first stops had apparently awakened a desire for controversy. In any case, Peymann made himself unpopular in the next city right from the start. In Stuttgart – "That's actually my true birthplace" – he didn't just concentrate on theater work, he also immediately got involved in political life, clashing with the state premier and collecting donations for dentures for the imprisoned terrorist Gudrun Ensslin. But he didn't stay long.

In Bochum, he succeeded Peter Zadek in 1979. Yet if he had staged even just one production of Kleist's "Hermannschlacht" here in the Ruhr region, one would have to say that it was probably his greatest era. No one before him had ever staged the ancient text so radically for the present; the trade journal "Theater heute" called it the "true premiere." For him, this Kleist, whom the Nazis had tried to appropriate for themselves, as had the GDR, was "something like the model of a liberation struggle with all its contradictions." A visually stunning stage feast, to which Peymann gave a laconic motto: "Theater is more beautiful than war."

Which isn't to say that he himself had become somehow peaceful. Quite the opposite; the great battle was yet to come. For the bourgeois-conservative circles in Vienna were thinking of the end of the world when it was confirmed that "Piefke" Peymann would become director of the Burgtheater. Today, people on the Danube look back with a touch of nostalgia on the years from 1986 to 1999, when the Burgtheater was primed for scandal and outrage because someone like Claus Peymann wanted to banish the staid bliss.

Some believed the German was demolishing this sacrosanct cultural institution, and not just when he staged Bernhard's "Heldenplatz," which caused the Austrians to feel a bit of a stir. That he restored Vienna to a true and contentious theater city remains undisputed.

And without the Bernhard-Peymann duo, things would have been boring at the Ring. So, people secretly enjoyed the nasty jokes and even found the director, who went shopping for a pair of trousers and to dinner with the poet at the Ring, quite human – "Claus Peymann buys himself a pair of trousers and goes to dinner with me" is actually the title of one of Bernhard's short plays from this turbulent time.

In Berlin, however, where he intended to establish himself as a principal when he took over Brecht's ensemble on Schiffbauerdamm, Peymann rarely provided artistic highlights. Today, the city at least cautiously acknowledges him as a facilitator, as a reviver of a pre-war theater tradition. The fact that he was not as loved on the Spree as he considered right and necessary was ultimately met with scorn and ridicule for his successor, Oliver Reese.

Since then, he's been wandering around, staging plays in Vienna's Josefstadt district, even going to provincial towns like Ingolstadt, and frequently making his presence felt in a humorously grumpy manner. He also delighted in old anecdotes, which he dug out from his friendship with Thomas Bernhard, a friendship somewhere between love and hate, whose contempt for the world he shared in all his self-dramatizations.

Once, many years ago, Claus Peymann was sitting at night in Café Havelka in Vienna and ordered Buchteln, a sweet pastry made from yeast dough for which the restaurant is famous. After the first bite, the artist angrily assured the waiter who brought the Buchteln that the pastry had been much better and larger back then, "when I was still director of the Burgtheater." The waiter next door listened – and simply shrugged his shoulders. The heyday of Buchteln and theater was apparently over.

Now the great theatre maker Claus Peymann has died at the age of 88 after a long illness.