Karl Kraus thought his anti-war tragedy “The Last Days of Mankind” (1922) was unplayable: Five acts, 220 scenes, five hundred characters – that goes beyond earthly time and stage dimensions.

"The performance," he noted, "is intended for a theater on Mars." Hans Hollmann did not want to wait until the red planet was settled.

In 1974 he brought out an abridged, but still seven-hour version spread over two evenings in the foyer of the Basler Theater, which was set up as a Viennese café: "In their excessive obsession and in their overkill effect, the excessiveness of the author and the director meet," he judged Georg Hensel in the "Darmstadt Echo".

Andreas Rossman

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

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The doomsday drama was the greatest and riskiest of the many adventures into which director Hollmann threw himself in his long theatrical career.

He was well versed in the repertoire across epochs, from Shakespeare and Goldoni to German classics, including "Faust I and II" (1980 in Hamburg), as well as Schnitzler and Horvath to Genet and Pinter, but he has repeatedly left the beaten track and found himself in the bushes of the unknown, also misunderstood.

With "Komödie der Vanity" (1978 in Basel) and "Die Befristeten" (1983 in Stuttgart) he recalled that Elias Canetti is a playwright beyond "Hochzeit".

He also defied convention with the pieces by the eccentric surrealist Raymond Roussel: in 1977 he ventured into “The Star on Your Forehead” in Basel, and in 1981 “Sonnenstaub” in Berlin.

And how was that with Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando and his play - it's really called that!

– "Baby Wallenstein or Prince Hamlet the Easter Bunny or 'Selawie'"?

Holder's nonsense, the silliness of nobility, fizzy lemonade, which becomes a louse primonade and sparkled as theater at the premiere in Zurich in 1984 and was appreciated with constant laughter.

Theater as an echo chamber of contemporary history

The director, who originally wanted to be a conductor, had an ear for the music of the texts, which made his scenic access verbatim, strict, often steep.

The stylizations also allowed brittle and bulky originals to gain form and stability: such as "Clara S.", the second play by Elfriede Jelinek, with the premiere of which (1982 in Bonn) he encouraged the author in her difficult love for the theater, or also the furious one First by Rainald Goetz, "War" (1987 also in Bonn), which he turned into a gloomy revue.

The production of Büchner's "Danton's Death", which Hollmann brought out shortly after November 9, 1989, was remembered most strongly.

What happened on the street in Leipzig echoed on the stage in Düsseldorf.

The theater became an echo chamber of contemporary history: not by depicting it, but by bringing up the emotions and driving forces of its actors.

The word of the year was also in the drama: "We are the people!" It was almost always present on the scene: as the subject of the story.

A historic stroke of luck.

And an artistic one.

Big city theatre, visually powerful and moving.

Born in Graz in 1933 as the son of a music teacher and privy councillor, Hans Hollmann was a doctor of law at the age of twenty-three.

and at twenty-five graduated actor.

After ten years as a journeyman at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt, he worked as a freelance director from 1968, also in the opera;

from 1992 to 2006 he held a professorship for directing in Frankfurt.

Only once more, from 1975 to 1978, did he have a permanent position as director of the Basler Theater.

Hans Hollmann died in Basel on Sunday at the age of 89.