BRONNEN, ARNOLT

(1895-1959)

   dramatist; best known for the play Vatermord. He was born in Vienna; his father was Ferdinand Bronnen, a Jewish playwright. After World War I, in which he was wounded and imprisoned, he forsook prewar legal studies and moved to Berlin* in search of success as a freelance writer. He was soon a prominent Expressionist* dramatist. But while his work retained the crude effects and violent language associated with Ex-pressionism, he soon migrated to a severe realism. Vatermord, a story of pat-ricide first performed in 1920, provoked a riot when it was staged in 1922. It was in reference to Bronnen's early work, not that of Bertolt Brecht,* that the term "epic theater" was first used.

   Bronnen soon moved from left radicalism to an ever more prominent nation-alism and anti-Semitism.* Already working seriously with the NSDAP by 1926, he formed a contact with Joseph Goebbels* and became a drama critic on the radio in 1933. Proclaiming himself the illegitimate son of an Aryan, he retained his Nazi membership until he was dismissed from his position in 1937. Return-ing to Austria,* he was active from 1940 with the Communist resistance. He worked as a journalist in Linz after World War II and moved to Vienna in 1951 to become a theater* director. In 1955 he relocated to East Berlin.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Garland and Garland, Oxford Companion to German Literature; Peter Gay, Weimar Culture.

(1895-1959)

   Playwright. Bronnen had shortlived success with "extreme Expressionism" in plays such as Vatermord (Patricide, 1922), Die Geburt der Jugend (The Birth of Youth, 1922), and Die Exzesse (The Excesses, 1923). Vatermord got attention after Max Reinhardt premiered it in Berlin, largely because of its overweening Oedipal conflict: the leading character commits incest with his mother and later murders his father. Bronnen then attempted to attract the attention of right-wing nationalists with plays glorifying the German war effort or the resistance to the 1923 French occupation of the Rhineland; he again got widespread, but brief, attention. When the Nazis came to power, Bronnen attempted to curry their favor with public denunciations of Reinhardt, and they gave him a minor post in a regional broadcasting studio. After the war, he attempted a playwriting comeback in East Germany, but it failed.