'Die andere Seite' or 'Journey's End'
'Die andere Seite' ('The Other Side') opened on 29 August 1929 at a Max Reinhardt theatre in Berlin. The play, written as 'Journey's End' by Robert Cedric Sheriff, had already been staged in London and New York, and its premier in Berlin was enormously successful. Mathias Wieman acted in the main role of Stanhope, and the director was Heinz Hilpert.
The setting of the play was the British front in WWI near St Quentin just before the German offensive in March 1918. Herbert Sulzbach, living in Berlin in 1929, went to see it at the Künstlertheater. In March 1918 he had fought 'on the other side' in that battle, and the play affected him deeply.
'Once, for a whole week long, I had behaved like that. Sheriff’s drama was set exactly at the same time as I, a young Prussian Lieutenant, and my regiment began the huge offensive early in the morning against the British 5th Army. I lived through those great, terrible, and unbelievable days all over again.'
Nearly twenty years after seeing the play, and after a Second World War, Captain Herbert Sulzbach arrived as an interpreter at a Prisoner of War camp for four thousand German officers at Featherstone Park in Northumberland.
The cultural programme meant that the large camp had four theatre stages, and many of the prisoners took part in the dramatics. On 26 February 1946, one month after his arrival, Sulzbach was invited to a performance of 'Journey's End'.
'They put it on ten times, so that two thousand PoW could see the piece which I had once seen in 1929 in Berlin, where it had moved me enormously. Now I saw 'Die andere Seite' afresh from the other side, and as a British captain, myself in khaki, I watched German PoW playing British roles. It is too much to be able to take in! I went back to my hut deeply impressed.'
(photo: the site of Featherstone Park PoW camp today)