BRONNEN, ARNOLT

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 Expressionism, he soon migrated to a severe realism. Vatermord, a story of patricide 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 nationalism 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. Returning 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.