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Professor Oliver Rathkolb traces the roots of Max Reinhardt and sheds light on his contribution to modern theater and the different perspectives of his legacy

Oliver Rathkolb is a professor at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Vienna (Austria), founding director of the Vienna Institute of Cultural and Contemporary History (VICCA), and chairperson of the Academic Committee of the House of European History in Brussels. He delivered the inaugural Max Reinhardt Lecture on September 8, 2023 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Max Reinhardt. This lecture will be held annually as a way to honor Max Reinhardt's artistic legacy and his stewardship of Schloss Leopoldskron.

Read the full transcript of Oliver Rathkolb's lecture here.

Acclaimed historian Oliver Rathkolb was invited to Salzburg Global Seminar in Salzburg, Austria, earlier this month to deliver the inaugural Max Reinhardt Lecture.  

Oliver, a professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, spoke on September 8th ahead of this year’s Reinhardt Celebration. The title of his lecture was “Max Reinhardt and Austrian Memory Politics from Habsburg to the Present”.  

Speaking in Fellows Hall, he delved deeply into the roots of Reinhardt's theatrical beginnings, his Jewish identity and experiences with antisemitism, his complicated personality, and his contributions to theater in Europe and further afield. 

Reinhardt was born on September 9, 1873, to a Jewish family with Hungarian citizenship. He started his career as a bank clerk but fell in love with theater and experienced his first stage performances in Vienna in 1890. He was hired by the famous German director and producer Otto Brahm in Berlin, where Reinhardt then established a small theater in 1903, starting his career as a producer and later as a renowned theater director. 

During his personal and professional life, Reinhardt faced persecution because of his identity. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the co-founder of the Salzburg Festival alongside Max Reinhardt, said of him, "They hate him three times and four times over, as a Jew, as a palace owner, as an artist, and as the solitary shy man whom they don't understand". Oliver recounted this as a “very good description” of the challenges that Reinhardt faced. 

Describing Reinhardt as an “unbelievable magician” and someone “who tried to explore and experiment with the European theater,” Oliver highlighted his work, his interest in training actors, and importantly his efforts to build schools for actors in Berlin and Vienna. Reinhardt was able to “organize the emotional power of the theater and that's his greatest success,” Oliver explained. 

Reinhardt's efforts to produce new fields of interaction between the audience and the actors made him the first artist to experiment with “participatory theater”. Oliver noted that what makes Reinhardt unique is how “he always tried to do it with an emotional approach… This [was an] interesting effort to try really avant-garde theater on the one hand, and at the same time get the audience on the emotional side, [so] that they are really tight and emotionally attached to the theater, [and] full of fantasy and joy”. 

As one of the “key innovators of German-speaking theater with a European and international dimension”, Max Reinhardt should be remembered for his successes, but also for the challenges he faced because of his complicated identity. Reinhardt's multifaceted legacy will continue to be honored with a Max Reinhardt Lecture held annually at Schloss Leopoldskron.

Read the full transcript of Oliver Rathkolb's lecture here.

Listen to the full lecture on Youtube.