It was a perfect human-interest story. "Berlin's first Jewish theatre since the Holocaust opens in the city" reported newspapers from the Berliner Morgenpost to Britain's Sunday Telegraph. When the Theater Bamah officially opened last weekend, the celebrities came in their droves, joined by society columnists and press photographers.
But the new theatre has started a bitter debate. For one thing, the Bamah is not the city's first Jewish theatre. Performers at the Hackesches Hof theatre in eastern Berlin have been staging productions with Jewish and Yiddish elements for almost a decade. They are angry at the hype surrounding the Bamah, but they are also worried.
"Jews have always been a part of theatre in Berlin. But 'Jewish theatre', that's a Nazi term," says Burkhard Seidemann, the director of the Hackesches Hof. "The Nazis turned theatre with Jewish performers and Jewish elements into 'Jewish theatre', making it something separate and curious," he says. "If you start down that road again, you are opening a door to who knows what."
The Hackesches Hof - called "a folk theatre, not a Jewish theatre" by its actors - is located in the city's Scheunenviertel, until the 1930s the home of Berlin's 160,000-strong Jewish community. As well as Jewish shops and schools, the area was once filled with theatres such as the Sophiensaule and the Concordia.
"These theatres were home to a type of theatre that was to become typical of the young Ernst Lubitsch and, later, the Marx Brothers: popular theatre on the borderline of cabaret or show business," says Prof Peter Sprengel, author of Popular Jewish Theatre in Berlin, 1877-1933.
More successful and better remembered are the Jewish actors and directors, such as Elisabeth Bergner and Max Reinhardt, who worked in Berlin's mainstream theatre. By the late 1930s, however, the only way for Jewish actors and directors to find work was to join the Jewish Cultural Association, an organisation established by the Nazis to ghettoise the Jewish creative community in Berlin.
Dan Lahav, an Israel-born director, says the opening of his theatre, named after the Hebrew word for stage, is the realisation of years of work. "Welcome to my dream," he told guests at the opening. He rejects criticism that he is creating a new ghetto for Jewish theatre.
"I don't want a theatre from Jews for Jews with Jews," he said. "Rather, I want a theatre for all who want to involve themselves with Jewish culture." With that in mind, he plans to stage a variety of works, from The Diary Of Anne Frank to the works of modern Israeli playwrights, as well as readings, concerts and a musical.
The 99-seat theatre in the western suburb of Wilmersdorf was renovated by the district's cultural authority and made available to him rent-free. The labour office agreed to pay the eight actors' wages for at least a year. After that, Lahav is coy about his financial arrangements. "I don't want to betray my donors. That I learned from Helmut Kohl," he says.
On the other side of Berlin, another performance of Die Purimspieler (The Purim Players) is under way to a full house. The play is a tribute to the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger and to the Yiddish theatre tradition that has its origins in the 16th-century Purimspiel, or Purim play. Six energetic actors clown around, dance, sing and act, switching effortlessly from German to Yiddish, the mixture of medieval German, Hebrew, Russian and Polish that was the mother tongue of the vast majority of east-European Jewry.
Unlike the Bamah, the Hackesches Hof survives solely on ticket sales, receiving no grant from the city. "If you threw a burning giraffe from the television tower, and got enough press coverage, the cultural ministry would think it was art and give you money, but not us," says Jalda Rebling, an actress. With more than 12,000 Jews living in Berlin, the steady influx from former Soviet-bloc countries has made the city the world's fastest-growing Jewish metropolis. "The rebirth of Jewish life, and in particular Jewish cultural life, in the city is simply a wonder," says Rebling.
Director Burkhard Seidemann agrees, but he remains wary of the overnight sensation of the Bamah. He says the huge interest in the new theatre has more to do with a persistent German need to make reparations for the past than it has with an interest in Jewish culture. "Many Germans still see Jews as exotic outsiders and not as Germans, something that has its roots in Nazi ideology," he says.
The opposition Christian Democratic Union started a lively debate last year on what constitutes German culture by suggesting immigrants should conform to a German "leading culture" of Goethe and Schiller. The suggestion caused uproar because of its similarities to Nazi-era policies of cultural supremacy. It was quickly dropped, but the debate demonstrated an overwhelming German need to categorise their culture, even if they can not define its parts.
Berlin's new "Jewish theatre" is another attempt to reduce culture to classifications, says Seidemann. "There is no German culture without Jewish culture," he says.
"If you start to separate Jewish culture from German culture, like the journalists who write about this new 'Jewish theatre' have done, then you're skating on thin ice.
