Fritz Kortner’s Return to Germany and the Figure of the Returning Exile in Kortner’s The Mission and Josef v. Báky’s Der Ruf

Abstract

Fritz Kortner, the celebrated actor both on stage and screen, left increasingly anti-Semitic and right-wing Germany in 1932 and moved with his young family from Berlin to Ascona in Switzerland. In his autobiography Aller Tage Abend, Kortner describes at length his stubborn refusal to see himself as an exile ‘in irgendeiner Fremde’, until Leonhard Frank eventually persuaded him of the inevitability of emigration. By the early 1930s right-wing theatre critics were pouring anti-Semitic grime over Kortner with increasing brutality, and there is a distinct shift in Kortner’s memoirs from a marked enthusiasm for and rootedness in Berlin with its many cafés and familiar faces to a sense of loss and alienation. Berlin had turned into an alien place and Germany into a strange, enemy nation — ‘eine[] fremde[] und feindlich gewordene[] Welt’.