Erwin Axer

Erwin Axer (1917 –2012) was a Polish theatre director, writer and university professor. A long-time head of Teatr Współczesny (Contemporary Theatre) in Warsaw, he also staged numerous plays abroad, notably in German-speaking countries, in the US and Leningrad (USSR).

Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Axer spent most of his early years in Lviv (now Ukraine), where he decided to devote his life to theatre.

The first years of the Soviet Invasion of Poland at the outbreak of World War II he made his living acting and staging dramas in the communist-controlled Polish Dramatic Theatre, the only Polish-language theatre left open in the city.

He took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to a quarry in Germany as a slave worker. After the war he returned to Poland and in 1946 became the head of the Chamber Theatre of the Soldiers' House in Łódź, an institution that moved to Warsaw the following year and was renamed the Teatr Współczesny. Axer headed that theatre for almost 40 years and retired only in 1981, following the imposition of the Martial Law in Poland.