ABSTRACT
By 1930 the Volksbühne was a nationwide movement with a membership of half a million in over three hundred local societies: It was ‘the greatest cultural organisation in Germany’. Like the inflation of 1923, the economic crisis of 1931–32 gave it, at least in some cities, a temporary illusion of even greater strength. Theatres which had closed their doors to Volksbühne bookings now welcomed them to fill their emptying seats. But the economic crisis also provided the last push needed to bring the National Socialists into power. Rudolf Ross, since 1928 Bürgermeister of Hamburg, warned the members of Hamburg Volksbühne in October 1932 that the forces of reaction were on the march:
Just as the nation’s impulses of feeling and will were stifled before the development of the Storm and Stress period at the time of Goethe and Schiller, a growing reaction might also now subjugate everything of potential greatness in dramatic art to an intellectual and spiritual autarky. That could mean a reverse from which we might not recover again for generations. [ 1 ]
