Bernhard Diebold

Bernhard Diebold (born Bernhard Ludwig Dreifus; 6 January 1886 – 9 August 1945) was a Swiss theatre critic and writer.

Life Bernhard Ludwig Dreifus was born into a protestant family in Zürich. His father, Bernhard Dreifus (1844–1929), was a Zürich businessman, originally from Aargau. His mother, Emilie Louise Diebold (1848–1932), came from a well established Zürich family. His parents divorced in 1900 following which, in 1902, he registered a name change from Bernhard Dreifus to Bernhard Diebold.

Between 1904 and 1906 he studied Law at Zürich, cutting short his studies and moving to Vienna in 1906, possibly inspired by Josef Kainz. He volunteered at the city's Court Theatre ("Burgtheater"), taking small stage parts and studying at its theatre school between 1906 and 1908. He went on to study Drama and Germanistics in Vienna and Berlin. His teachers at Berlin included Max Herrmann and Erich Schmidt.

Diebold lived in Munich from 1913, working as a Dramaturge at the Schauspielhaus (as the "Kammerspiele" theatre was known at that time). At the same time he wrote his first theatre critiques and reviews. He stayed in Berlin initially. However, at the start of 1934 he was served with a work ban because of his Jewish religion, and in 1935 he was excluded from the Reich Chamber of Literature. He returned to Zürich. In 1936 he was still contributing to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a correspondent, but in that year he was served with a writing ban. He also applied himself as a prose writer, publishing in 1938 an 840 page novel, "Das Reich ohne Mitte", which dealt with the failure of the political centre in Germany. His efforts as a prose writer beyond the journalistic milieu brought him no success, however.