Frankfurt has lost a very great cultural figure: At the age of 83, Wolfgang Kaus, who was the head of Frankfurt's Volkstheater and its artistic director for 33 years, passed away on July 18. Wolfgang Kaus lived for the stage - on it and behind it.
Wolfgang Kaus was born in Hofheim am Taunus. After attending drama school in Wiesbaden, Kaus worked at renowned theatres in Frankfurt, Memmingen, Celle and Bonn. At the Thalia Theater in Hamburg he was on stage for one year with the then already famous Harald Juhnke in "Liliom". Parallel to this, Wolfgang Kaus brought it to no less than 60 television appearances, whether in the "Stahlnetz" detective stories, in the Zuckmayer adaptation "Schinderhannes" or in Fritz Umgelter's "Der Winter, der ein Sommer war" with Günter Strack, Horst Frank and Christian Quadflieg.
City of Frankfurt's Head of Cultural Affairs, Ina Hartwig, expressed her deepest sympathy: "Wolfgang Kaus had devoted himself to the theatre; the stage was his home. With his death, an era of popular theatre comes to an end. He still had a command of all Frankfurt dialects, the multiplicity of which is simply fascinating to the lulled ear. I had the good fortune to be able to get to know him. Always warm and humorous, Wolfgang Kaus had a fine sense for the needs of his fellow men. The city of Frankfurt owes a great deal to the actor and philanthropist Wolfgang Kaus. His theatre saw itself as a reconciling one, rooted locally - but confident enough to ground world literature in Hessian."
It was the folk actress Liesel Christ who brought Wolfgang Kaus to Frankfurt. Here, as director of the Volkstheater, he translated and adapted plays by Shakespeare, Molière and Goldoni for the Hessian dialect and staged recitals with texts by Goethe and Friedrich Stoltze. He made a guest appearance in Israel in 1979 with "Urfaust", and was celebrated for his "Mother Courage" starring Liesel Christ, as he was for numerous other classics he translated into Frankfurt dialect
