13. Landmine detonators at the Acting and Directing Seminar

[Detailed catalog text in german]

On 12 February. 1945, an explosion occurred at the “Acting School of the Burgtheater” (today: Max Reinhardt Seminar) in the Palais Cumberland during the handling of landmine detonators. A student was injured, and several windows were broken. What were acting and directing students doing with explosive material like this?

In 1944, in line with the “measures for total war deployment” set by Joseph Goebbels, among other things, “all theatres, variety shows, cabarets, and acting schools were to be closed by 1 September 1944” (Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 25 August 1944, p. 1f.). The Acting and Directing Seminar (then referred to as the Acting School of the Burgtheater) of the Reich University for Music in Vienna was also affected. Hans Niederführ (1902–1987), the head of the Seminar, sought a solution to ensure its continued existence.

Thanks to the connections of student Rolf Kunowski (1917–2014), the arts and crafts business “Tiroler Hauskunst” took on a contract to produce landmine detonators. The students and teachers of the Acting and Directing Seminar, together with students of stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Institute of Theatre Studies of the University of Vienna, worked as part of this armour deployment, based out of Palais Cumberland.

The students worked 40 hours per week, which were scheduled in such a way that collective lessons could be held in the afternoons. Individual tuition took place in the mornings alongside regular working hours. Performances were still taking place until shortly before the end of the hostilities in Vienna, with the final one held on 29 March 1945.

That Kunowski, of all people, became the initiator and subsequently the manager of this landmine detonator production is not without a certain irony: He had been interned as a political prisoner in a sub-camp of Dachau, was active in the Social Democratic resistance and had to conceal his father’s Jewish origins with forged documents. Regarding the lingering suspicion of sabotage, he spoke rather cautiously in later interviews: “If I’m accused of sabotage, as I see it – how should one put it – the war was already lost, there wasn’t much left to sabotage.”