“Why exactly is the Akademietheater called the Akademietheater?” Is its name just an inexplicable relic of bygone times? Is it a former training facility of the Burgtheater? Or perhaps a one-time modernist refuge from the court theatres of the monarchy?

Franz Kafka’s close confidant Max Brod is said to have coined the oft-quoted saying according to which Prague was one hundred percent Czech, one hundred percent Jewish, and one hundred percent German. This paradoxical ascription points to the complex cultural makeup of Bohemia’s capital city, where ethnic, linguistic, and religious affiliations existed not distinctly side-by-side but as a dense web of relationships. The Prague of that era stood alongside Vienna as an important cultural centre of the Habsburg Monarchy in which imperial, national, and transnational influences overlapped.

In late 1924, just over a century ago, the then-Academy of Music and Performing Arts was joined by a Fachhochschule of Music and Performing Arts—a further predecessor of today’s mdw that was intended to operate in parallel with the Academy. Just a few years later, however, the Fachhochschule was dissolved—plunging its sister institution into a deep crisis.

Das Haus der Träumer; Indische Flamme; Kronprinz Rudolf. Das Leben eines merkwürdigen Mannes. These are but a few of the works from the prolific pen of Viennese writer Erwin Weill, an oeuvre whose creation was abruptly cut short by the National Socialist regime and whose creator lost his life at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945.