Until the end of 1956, Fritz Kortner worked on his staging of Hamlet in Berlin for the Schillertheater (premiere 13 March 1957). He was asked about this in an eight-minute radio interview. What is noticeable is that his exile and return from America (which were already 10 years hence) continued to be of great importance for his work at this time.

Kortner responded to the question about to what degree he provoked “positively scandalous” scenes to reinvigorate the theatrical scene with a brief summary of his theatrical productions: He did not regard his stagings as provocative, but the plays themselves, as their shock effects had been repressed or diluted in Nazi productions. Kortner regarded it as an on-going task to continue this German theatre trend of moving away from playing down the controversial nature of the classics and towards being an art form that moves its audience. As he stated in another interview: “Stirring up the lethargic, and shaking loose the conventions and traditions that have established themselves so successfully in post-Hitler theatre is so wearing.”

The interview excerpt shows clearly the extent to which the director still regarded his artistic position as opposing the remnants of Nazi thinking, even in 1957.