The actor, Fritz Kortner, excelled in both modern and classical repertoires. His role as Friedrich in Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung (1919) catapulted Kortner to early stardom. But the actor’s greatest fame in the Weimar Republic was linked to his renderings of Shakespeare’s most problematical and memorable characters, from Othello, Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth, to Shylock. As the years of the Weimar Republic unfolded, Shylock became Kortner’s signature role. The actor’s celebrated 1927 presentation of Shylock as victim made Kortner the darling of the influential critic, Alfred Kerr, but also a prime target of the radical Right. Nazi pundits soon depicted the actor as the quintessential Jewish villain: aggressive, manipulative, power-hungry, sexually dissolute, a leftist-radical and an agent of cultural bolshevism, but above all, as a modern Shylock whose elimination was openly called for in Der Stürmer. Fleeing Germany in 1933 Kortner embarked on the long and bitter years of exile, first in London, later in New York and finally in Hollywood. Following the war Kortner, along with Brecht and others, was committed to rebuilding the German theater. His postwar career as director in the West German theater was marked by triumph, scandal, and adversity. While critically acclaimed and lauded for numerous productions, including, perhaps most famously, Max Frisch’s Andorra (1962), he was frequently decried in the West German press as a tyrant and dictator. Through it all, the uncompromising, and provocative Kortner worked to return the German theater to the stature and fame it had known before 1933, and its inevitable decline under Nazi rule.