Theater criticism is the art of interpreting what happened on stage in the past.

In this sense, the daily criticism, which seems to be so up-to-date, is part of an ongoing theater history - even where it doesn't see itself that way.

Nobody has shown this so clearly and has known how to make it so fruitful as Günther Rühle.

He demanded that the productions he saw reflect the present in which he lived.

And it was the hope he harbored.

He didn't expect too much from a theater without a reference to the times, a theater history without a contemporary history.

It probably would have hurt him even more that the longer Rühle lived, the theater told him less and less about those for whom it was performed and more and more about those who did it.

if he hadn't believed in theater in an existential sense.

Ranke's sentence that history has people as its object, he applied to the theater, who saw himself neither as a historian nor as a theater scholar.

Hubert Spiegel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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West Berlin, January 1970. The director Peter Palitzsch, who had left the GDR for the West nine years earlier, combined four of Shakespeare's royal dramas into a project that he called "The War of the Roses".

It gets bloody: sons kill their fathers, fathers kill their sons, the king crouches exhausted between corpses on a battlefield.

“All this”, according to Günther Rühle in the third volume of “Theater in Deutschland”, his monumental presentation of the theater between 1887 and 1995, “in the brightest light, in front of white walls, exhibited under a large frieze of skeletons and skulls above the stage, on which the burnt beams of ruined houses hung like missiles from the murdered sky.

Played by actors in Brecht's pointing style.

More quickly,

often film-like change of scenes (Wilfried Minks built a system of sliding walls).

There was a banishing distance.

Twice three hours.

At the end an ovation, 'an event'.

– This is how the year began in which the war in Vietnam could also be experienced in Europe.” And it is so gripping, so direct to read when Günther Rühle interweaves a vivid description and contemporary history.

For the first volume of his monumental portrayal, which was published in 2007 and begins in 1887, Rühle took his fellow critics from earlier theater epochs as a source, decades apart, in order to be able to describe and visualize what he himself could neither do on stage nor as a recording could see.

This restriction also applies to large parts of the second volume, which covers the years from 1945 to 1966 and was published in 2014.

The third volume, now published posthumously, looks at the years from 1967 to 1995.

Rühle worked on it almost until the end of his life before he lost his sight.

The work that he now had to put in someone else's hands was already well advanced and comprised more than seven hundred pages, but also the version that had been revised and supplemented in a number of places,

which Hermann Beil and Stephan Dörschel have now published is still a fragment.

In September 2020, the author sent the manuscript to his editors, Günther Rühle died on December 10, 2021 at the age of 97.

One last work had appeared three months earlier: a life and farewell book entitled “An old man gets older”.