MEPHISTO

About the show

Klaus Mann's exile novel, subtitled "The Story of a Career", which he said he intended "to only portray types, not portraits", was immediately banned after its publication in 1936. For it was easy to recognise the actor, director and artistic director Gustaf Gründgens, once a close artistic colleague and brother-in-law of Klaus Mann, who had risen to fame in the role of Mephisto, in the main character of Hendrik Höfgen. As a writer who had fled the Nazis, was openly homosexual and part of the antifascist resistance, Klaus Mann's "Mephisto" is a scathing satire about the opportunism of the former drawing-room communists who mutated into "monkeys of power" in the blink of an eye in Germany between 1925 and 1936. Gründgens became a prime example of the contradiction between high art amidst the basest barbarism. "But I’m only an ordinary actor" is the last thing Höfgen says in the novel, and an actor has to act. Klaus Mann committed suicide in 1949 by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets. Gustaf Gründgens too, who was a skilled at contorting himself to court success in every system, died fourteen years later of an overdose of sleeping tablets. But the duel between the two dead men lives on in "Mephisto". Frank Castorf confronts us with the intoxication of power, the eroticism of betrayal and the charm of downfall, which we can still be seduced by today just as we were then.