Albert Kehm was born on March 24, 1881, in Stuttgart. He studied acting under practitioners like the Hoftheater actor Wilhelm Göhns and debuted at the Theater Bonn in 1901. He performed on over a dozen stages as part of his training, closing this chapter in Hanover, Bremen, and Dresden. He began directing in 1912, in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), and moved to Stuttgart in this capacity the following year. From 1914 until 1919 he led the Stadttheater in Bern. By the time he was appointed general director in Stuttgart in 1920, he had already garnered a reputation as a well-versed man of the theater. Those who knew him emphasized his “masculine nobleness” and his “endearing character.”
Kehm had an eye for talent, engaging outstanding performers like Fritz Wisten, Rudolf Fernau, Mila Kopp, and Berta Drews. He enjoyed just as much success with the opera ensemble, bringing top players like Lydia Kindermann, Hildegard Ranczak, and Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender to Stuttgart for multiple-year engagements or, like Hermann Weil, longer-term positions. The repertoire, too, was anything but provincial; rather, it attested to what Kehm saw as the disruptive and enlightening role of the theater. He wanted “works by contemporaries to speak to the public” and the opposing views expressed in these works to “argue against one another.” Accordingly, the repertoire included plays by Georg Kaiser, Carl Sternheim, Frank Wedekind, Franz Werfel, Luigi Pirandello, and Bertolt Brecht as well as opera pieces by Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, and Kurt Weill. Because he succeeded in bringing like-minded senior stage directors to the theater, the works of Ernst Barlach and Friedrich Wolf could be introduced to the theater’s repertoire, and works by other authors could be staged in Stuttgart soon after their original premieres.
This way of managing the theater was met with resistance from ethno-nationalist, radical right-wing parties early on. As the NS-Kurier, the Nazi party’s newspaper in Stuttgart, lamented in November of 1932: “One who has such little comprehension of German art and of a repertoire curated in the German spirit, or who does not possess the courage ... to push back against the Jewish—Marxist Klüngel and advocate for a repertoire that aligns with German sensibilities, has no business being the general director of a German state theater.”
Undeterred, Kehm went on the offensive against radical right-wing attempts in the state parliament to exert influence on his repertoire. His contemporaries described him as a “lifelong, committed democrat” who “lived democratic theater.” This attitude made it possible to reach compromises, even with conservative ministers of education and the arts, and in 1933 kept him from capitulating to the Nazis. After Kehm had ignored demands to join the Nazi Party, he was furloughed on March 27, 1933, by Minister of Education and the Arts Christian Mergenthaler, and his employment was terminated at the earliest possible date, on August 1, 1935. In the interim, he was transferred to Freiburg as theater director, a post he stepped down from in June of 1935 for health reasons. In 1945 he was commissioned by the Allies to rebuild the Stuttgart State Theater, though he withdrew from the assignment the following year due to internal conflicts and the occupation forces’ efforts to influence the repertoire. Albert Kehm died on July 24, 1961, in Gräfelfing, near Munich.
1881 Stuttgart
1961 Gräfelfing