Mephisto Original 2013 Theatre Poster

Photograph Description

Mephisto Original  2013 rare Hungarian Theatre Poster

measures 27×39″ inches / 70 x 100 cm

Mephisto is a political drama theatre production based on the novel of the same title by Klaus Mann.

Klaus Mann fled to exile in March 1933 to avoid political persecution by Hitler’s regime.

The author Hermann Kesten suggested that he write a novel of a homosexual careerist in the Third Reich, with the director of the state theatre Gustaf Gründgens as a subject matter.

Gründgens’s homosexuality was widely known.

Gründgens and Mann had both belonged in the early 1930s to a strongly left-wing theatre group that in January 1933 was touring Spain.

When Hitler was German Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the group was in Madrid, and Mann urged Gründgens not to return to Germany.

When Gründgens disregarded Mann’s advice and not only returned to Germany, but embraced the Nazi regime (for purely opportunistic reasons), Mann never forgave his former friend Gründgens.

Klaus Mann was exiled in 1934 whilst Gründgens became a renowned theater and movie director in Nazi Germany.

While Mann never called Gründgens an adversary, he admitted “moved antipathy”. Although he attacked Gründgens in newspaper articles, Mann hesitated to use homosexuality as a theme in the novel as he himself was gay and decided to use “negroid masochism” as the main character’s sexual preference.

After the novel’s publication in 1936, the newspaper Pariser Tageszeitung presented it as a roman à clef. Mann resented this characterization and argued that he had not written about a particular individual, but about a type of individual.