This essay discusses the drama Another Sun, a collaboration between Hitler's most outspoken American opponent, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, and Fritz Kortner, the Jewish actor from the Weimar stage whom the Nazis hated intensely. Problems of language and accents, intrinsic to the exile experience, comprise the heart of the play. The main character of the drama, an exiled actor, struggles to accept that he can no longer take on the Shakespearean roles he had so successfully performed in Berlin, due to his inability to master them in their original language. Numerous other parallels to Kortner's and Thompson's own lives run throughout the play and inform its main characters. The following analysis presents the first close reading of the drama in the secondary literature to date, and explores three main reasons for the play's failure on Broadway: transcultural conflicts, signified by the use of languages and accents in the plot; the cultural differences between the American stage and the Weimar theater; and political sentiments in the United States at the time of the drama's premiere in 1940.
For exile they change their homes and pleasant thresholds to seek a country lying beneath another sun.
—Virgil, Georgics, Book 2, I. 511IN 1938, FRITZ KORTNER AND DOROTHY THOMPSON joined forces to work on a drama initially titled Spell Your Name. After several revisions, however, the play premiered at the National Theater on Broadway on February 23, 1940 as Another Sun. The play aimed to change the American public's apathy towards the plight of the refugees from Nazi persecution. As early as 1937, the New York Times announced the forthcoming play in its “News of the Stage”: Fritz Kortner, the German actor, has been writing a play. “Spell Your Name,” it is, and there is a bit of autobiography in the plot: an exile from Nazi Berlin who comes to America. Part of it is in German, part in English, and when it is adapted, Mr. Kortner may be the producer, may even be in it, himself. His secretary, Fred Sanger, is helping to Anglicize it. At the time of the widely anticipated premiere of the play, Dorothy Thompson was at the height of her career. According to Time magazine, which ran her photo on the cover on June 12, 1939, “She and Eleanor Roosevelt are undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S.”