The son of an instrument maker, actor Karl Paryla was born on August 12, 1905, in Vienna and grew up together with his brother—who also later became an actor—in the working-class milieu of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fascinated by the theater from an early age, he passed the entrance examination to the Vienna Academy of Music and Performing Arts in 1922, appeared as an extra at various theaters in the city beginning in 1923, and made his stage debut at the Raimund Theater in 1924. In 1926, Paryla moved to Germany, where he performed first in Mannheim and Cologne, then in Darmstadt during the 1927/28 season, in Düsseldorf during the 1928/29 season, and in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) from 1929 to 1931. In September of 1931, the young actor returned to the Hessian Landestheater Darmstadt, where he immediately won over audiences and critics alike with his vitality and passion in leading roles in Max Dreyer’s Die Reifeprüfung, George Bernard Shaw’s Blanco Posnet, and Gerhart Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, as well as playing Melchthal in William Tell and Mortimer in Mary Stuart.
Paryla had already become politically active during his time in Breslau, where he led a workers’ theater group within the Communist Association for Workers’ Culture that performed agitprop plays at Communist Party rallies. In Darmstadt, too, as a member of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition, he made no secret of his political convictions. To the Nazis, Paryla was therefore a political opponent who had to be dealt with. On March 16, 1933, he was placed on leave and, together with his friend Hermann Gallinger, became one of the first victims of the purges that followed the dismissal of General Director Hartung. House searches followed, but so did a gesture of solidarity from fellow actor Kurt Westermann, who came to the aid of Paryla and Gallinger. Paryla returned to Vienna, where he worked at the Theater in der Josefstadt until 1938. After the annexation of Austria, he was once again persecuted by the Gestapo and emigrated in the summer of 1938 to Zurich, joining the Schauspielhaus, where Gustav Hartung, Kurt Hirschfeld, and Wolfgang Langhoff were also working. Paryla soon developed a close friendship with Langhoff. Over the next ten years, he performed some ninety roles at the theater, which had become a refuge for many émigrés. These performances included the world premieres of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Life of Galileo.
After the war, Paryla returned to Austria and, in 1948, founded the Neues Theater in der Scala in Vienna. Because of its revolutionary self-image, the company was denounced as a “Russian theater” during the early Cold War and was closed in 1956. In the years that followed, Paryla made films for DEFA, worked increasingly at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin, and received the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic for his production of the Wallenstein trilogy. The construction of the Berlin Wall and the hardening of cultural policy prompted Paryla to leave East Berlin. During the following years, he worked as an actor and director at numerous theaters in Austria, Switzerland, and West Germany. In 1972, he returned to Darmstadt to direct a guest production of Paul Dessau’s Die Verurteilung des Lukullus at the Hessian Landestheater Darmstadt. Karl Paryla died on July 14, 1996, in Vienna.
1905 Vienna
1996 Vienna