Helmut Schilling

Helmut Schilling, SAPA Foundation

Insights into the work of a versatile and socially critical author

Collection housed in

Berne

The estate of Helmut Schilling contains a wealth of different genres, including plays, novels, radio dramas, radio lectures, musical readings, documentary film commentaries and poetry. Schilling’s stage works are of particular interest; written during the Second World War and the Cold War and continually revised, Das Friedensspiel reflected - on numerous German and Swiss stages between 1942 and 1959 - the repeated outbreak of devastating wars in Europe, while Experiment René, staged at the Atelier-Theater Bern in 1966, denounced the handling of nuclear weapons. The collection is especially significant for SAPA because, as early as the 1950s, Schilling established Bernese German as a stage language.

An overview of the Helmut Schilling collection at SAPA can be found in the Swiss Performing Arts Platform.