Most recently, Günther Rühle did what this critic and chronicler of the theater was best at, despite progressive blindness: to write. This does not mean the work on the third volume of his large-scale German theater history. He had to stop it with a heavy heart, his eyes were already too weak for that. What the man incapacitated by macular degeneration began in October 2020, at the age of 96, instead and wrapped up for six months was a diary – for the first time in his life. He typed the sentences in the two-finger system “on good luck” into the computer keyboard without being able to read the lines, often hitting the wrong way, as he puts it bitterly ironically, a “maker of word salad”, dependent on someone from “these scraps of diaries” makes a readable manuscript.
This somebody was found in the dramaturge and theater friend from the old days Gerhard Ahrens, who published the recordings in the Berlin Alexander Verlag that fall. “An old man gets older” is Günther Rühles most personal legacy, he calls it “a strange diary” in the subtitle. Strange, if only because a completely different person can be experienced here than the strictly relevant, strict, life-long theater-explanation-Rühle who only thinks, lives and writes in work contexts, in his demeanor – this should be added from colleagues’ waiting – mostly grouchy, old-fashioned, cheerful charm. He himself writes in astonishment: “In these diary entries, I reveal something about myself for the first time. For the first time, I formulate something inside that I did not know myself, or perhaps did not want to know.” He only ever lived according to what he calls the “Rühles performance principle”. “It took me ninety years to relate to myself.”
In his diary he tried to “see himself as an old man”
Against this background, what the “shut down” Rühle perceived in itself is all the more touching. In his diary he tried to “see himself as an old man”, to record what was happening to him, what was still going and what was no longer when you headed towards 100 – and what the difference was between getting older, getting old and getting old . He describes his daily rituals, his “route” (1200 steps a day), the difficulties with the computer or getting dressed, the occasional suicidal thoughts, the emptiness in the house in the Taunus. All of this very sober, cool, without any confusion. His wife Margret died in 2008. They are the notes of a lonely man at the end of his life. “You are silent most of the day. Sometimes you discover yourself in self-talk. You feel strange when you discover yourself.”
Goethe is a companion, Rühle hears his “Poetry and Truth” (on CD). And he goes to his friend in spirit, the great Berlin critic and later exile Alfred Kerr (1867-1948), whom he (again) brought close to the Germans. Rühle not only published the eight volumes of Kerr’s edition of works, but also the “Berliner Briefe” he had found, which, in addition to his reviews, identified Kerr as a linguistically virtuoso writer. “It was almost a life’s work, an exhumation, a restoration,” he writes about it in his diary. And it was a sensation. He also edited the “Gesammelte Schriften” by Marieluise Fleißer.
Rühle came from a family of bakers from Weilburg, his father was a dialect poet
Increasingly “overwhelmed by memories” while writing, Rühle travels back in his diary to stages in his life as a journalist, critic and theater director. And occasionally also in his childhood, which he spent in Weilburg an der Lahn, where his grandfather ran a bakery. The family later moved to Bremen, where the father, a passionate dialect poet, worked as an auditor. The mother dutiful, hardworking, without “talent for happiness”. In 1942, at the age of 17, Günther Rühle was drafted as a soldier and experienced the horrors of the last years of the war. He then did his Abitur in Bremen, studied German, history and folklore in Frankfurt am Main and was doing his doctorate on “Dreams and ghostly apparitions in the tragedy of Andreas Gryphius”.
Rühle becomes a journalist, initially with East-West Courier and at the Frankfurter Rundschau, then, from 1954 to 1960, features editor of the Frankfurt New Press, where he writes first theater reviews. In 1960 he switched to the features section of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), whose management he took over in 1974 – with the downside that as a feature editor he was no longer allowed to write theater reviews. The new editor Joachim Fest had forbidden him to do so. In his diary Rühle writes how bitter it was for him. Under the abbreviation “gr”, Rühle had made a name for himself as a liberal, combative, open-minded critic. In the FAZ he was considered a leftist simply because he threw himself into the breach for Brecht’s work.
The time as artistic director in Frankfurt appeared to him as a “mutation”
When he was “pressured” by Hilmar Hoffmann, the then Frankfurt cultural director, and other urban grandees to take over the troubled Frankfurt drama, he did so: Rühle changed sides and was artistic director from 1985 to 1990. For him a “mutation”. It wasn’t a really happy time. The planned premiere of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play “Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod” in 1985 led to heated arguments with the Jewish community, which found the play to be anti-Semitic. It was a real theatrical scandal. There were also protests similar to cultural struggles against Einar Schleef, whom Rühle enforced in his five-year directorship as director.
After these painful experiences with theater practice, Rühle began his time as a theater researcher, theater historian, theater chronicler – and as the gray eminence of his subject, which he was throughout his life. His two-volume documentation “Theater in Deutschland 1887-1945” (2007) and “Theater in Deutschland 1946-1966” (2014) comprise around three thousand pages and are a basic work for theater studies. The fact that he could no longer complete the third volume of his “life’s work”, his examination of the theater from Claus Peymann, Peter Zadek, Peter Stein, Christoph Marthaler to Frank Castorf, was a “profound pain” for Rühle: “Like Shylocks Pound flesh from the living body. ” This unfinished third part, “Theater in Deutschland 1967-1995”, will nevertheless appear in fragmentary form next year (all with S. Fischer), supervised and edited by the dramaturge Hermann Beil.
His annual speech at the Theatertreffen was on the state of this art
The strict thinker and theater analyst Günther Rühle was President and then Honorary President of the German Academy of Performing Arts from 1993-1999 and President and since then Honorary President of the Alfred Kerr Foundation, which awards an actor’s prize every year during the Berlin Theatertreffen. When this prize was awarded, Rühle always gave a speech on the state of the theater: critical, admonishing, often very culturally pessimistic. But despite all the pulpit-like character, it was always palpable: Rühle’s love for theater and, behind it, this unbreakable conviction of theater as a culturally formative force.
Günther Rühle wrote against his “departure from the world”: “You die longer in your thoughts than in your body.” On this Friday death actually occurred in the house in Bad Soden im Taunus. Günther Rühle died at the age of 97.