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"The International Theatre"
Magazin of the International Union of the Revolutionary Theatre
(russ. MORT).
This magazine provided a revealing insight into international efforts in various artistic fields at the beginning of the 1930s. It vividly demonstrated that the revolutionary artistic achievements of workers and communist artists were inextricably linked.
The union was founded in August 1929 under the name "International Union of the Revolutionary Theatre" in Moscow. It pursued the goal of combining the workers' theater troupes and the revolutionary workers' theater organizations of all countries, promoting the international exchange of experience and materials, developing common theoretical and methodological foundations, and creating contacts in the form of guest performances, conferences, festivals, competitions, etc. The Western European office was located in Berlin. The second plenary session in November 1932 renamed the union: "The International Union of the Revolutionary Theatre". This meant that the restriction to the "independent" theater (amateur theater) of the workers was abandoned. The IURT tried to unite all anti-fascist theater professionals in order to meet the need for an international red united front. In addition, attempts were made to establish closer ties with composers, dancers and filmmakers. Until the second half of the 1930s, the IURT had a particularly fruitful influence on revolutionary theater in capitalist countries by imparting the experience of Soviet theater and linking international efforts.
The journal "The International Theatre" was published from September 1932 until the end of 1933 as a series of "Bulletins of the International Olympiad of Proactive Revolutionary Theater". The bulletins prepared for and evaluated a theater Olympiad that took place in Moscow in May 1933. They appeared in four slightly varied editions in Russian, German, English and French. When the bulletins had fulfilled their function, the journal "The Internationale Theatre" was continued from January 1934 as a "Journal for Theater, Music, Film, Dance" in a two-monthly cycle. The German edition could no longer appear from the end of 1934 due to Hitler fascism.
The first issues of the German edition mainly contain articles on the preparation of the Theatre Olympics, appeals, protocols and declarations of the IURT, reports on workers' theater in the capitalist countries and in the Soviet Union. This reflected the original limitation of the IURT to proletarian lay theater. But the number of contributions dealing with bourgeois theater, heritage, revolutionary professional theater, problems of aesthetics, literature, film, music, dance, and theater history grew from issue to issue. The circle of authors also expanded. In addition to the pioneers of international workers' theater, leading figures in Soviet art, as well as Marxist-Leninist theorists and historians, were represented with contributions. We find essays by or about Gorky and Lunacharsky, Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, and Eisenstein, Mayakovsky, Glebov, Tretyakov, among others.
German authors published essays and excerpts from plays. In his essay "Decay of Bourgeois Theater, Advance of Proletarian Art" (issue 3/1933), Friedrich Wolf discussed the situation of German theater at the beginning of the 1930s. He described how the capitalist theater business was increasingly permeated by militaristic and fascist tendencies, while revolutionary acting collectives such as Wangenheim's "Truppe 31" and workers' theater groups like Wolf's "Spieltrupp Südwest" were at the forefront of progressive German theater. The essay "The Western Drama of the Imperialist War" (issue 5/6 - 1934) provided an overview of the dramatic portrayal of the war. Wolf showed that only the young communist playwrights had succeeded in convincingly depicting the real character of the imperialist war.
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