A metropolitan spirit – The theatrologist, dandy and universal scholar Andrzej Wirth (1927–2019)

In the thaw after Stalin’s death he was editor of the legendary magazines “Polityka” and “Nowa Kultura”. Andrzej Wirth escaped a new Stalinist ice age in the 1960s with a scholarship to the West. There he was a visiting professor for literature, cultural history and theatre primarily in the USA, in Amherst, New York, Stanford and (on the recommendation of Walter Höllerer) at the Berlin Technical University. Between these, or later, came Oxford and the Free University in Berlin. In addition, thanks to his connections with Grass und Frisch, Wirth soon belonged to Group 47, whose 1966 meeting in Princeton abroad he helped to organize. This meeting featured Peter Handke’s sensational first revolutionary appearance. Andrzej Wirth quickly understood his self-reflexive debut piece “Publikumsbeschimpfung” (“Insulting the Audience”), in which Handke had installed a speaking choir instead of individual characters, as an example of avant lettre, “post-dramatic” theatre that he himself would later declare to be the definitive method (and sometimes fashion) of modernism.

An utterly different leap: When Volker Schlöndorff’s “Return to Montauk” premiered at the 2017 Berlinale and we were talking about the film that was modelled on Max Frisch's famous novella “Montauk”, Wirth told me that he was the man behind the whole story: “The love story in May 1974, described by Max Frisch, was based on the affair with my student Alice, who became Lynn in the book. I was holding a seminar in New York on contemporary German literature, when I heard that Max was coming to do some readings. So I invited him to attend my seminar, and Alice took care of him on behalf of his New York publishing house. That’s how it was. Love happens.”

Wirth was indeed a great mediator, a real cosmopolitan, a Polish-American-German professor with connections stretching from Venice in Italy to Venice in California. In this respect, he can only be compared with his compatriot Jan Kott, who died in Santa Monica in 2001: a Pole in exile whose books taught the whole world to understand Shakespeare anew. For his part, Wirth brought the Polish (theatre) avant-garde from Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz to Jerzy Grotowski with him to the West. His interpretation of the work of his American friend Robert Wilson helped him on his way to world fame: for example, in 1979, during the legendary performance of “Death, Destruction & Detroit”, in the Berlin Schaubühne he unraveled the secret of the scenes that oscillated between the prison and the world of machines and explained them as Wilson’s parable about the Hitler intimus Albert Speer. For Germans he discovered, among many others, the grandiose Jewish-Galician poet Bruno Schulz, a long forgotten victim of Nazi terror.

This man with his white crew cut and dark glasses to protext him from the light that in his later years was often too bright for him, was a leading metropolitan spirit. At his famous house parties young ladies occasionally appeared dressed in his father’s impeccable officer’s uniform that was so full of military decorations that it resembled a theatrical costume. This clearly shows that the dandy Andrzej Wirth was not a man to be found in ordinary salons. He also had a sense for the playful in everyday life, for its subtext and deeper content – and also for the cosmopolitan dialogue of cultures. That’s why a young (female) general in a Polish war uniform in Wirth’s living room could transform herself into a delicate Japanese Butoh dancer. Such an event might be followed by a presentation by a Venetian fashion designer or a brief talk by a New York professor of aesthetics, both of whom were women.

After his return from the USA, however, he became famous and, according to his own self-ironic assessment, somewhat notorious as the founder of the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen. Starting in 1982, it also turned German theatre studies upside down from theory into practice, following the example of the drama departments in US American universities. Indeed, with Wirth’s avant-garde blessing, the Institute soon became the Central European breeding ground of that “post-dramatic” theatre, which regards literary plays as little more than deconstructable “material” for any performative style: the splendour and misery of the contemporary scene. The Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, in short ATW like its creator (Andrzej Tadeusz Wirth), then turned out “best of the bunch” directors and authors like René Pollesch, Tim Staffel, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, the playwright (and thus anti-post-dramatist) Moritz Rinke and the heads of the groups Rimini Protokoll, She She Pop and Gob Squat. And it was Wirth who, between 1982 and 1992, brought artists and intellectuals like Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, George Tabori and Marina Abramovic to give workshops and courses in the otherwise peaceful Hessian province.