Agency · 1952 – 1975
The writers he brought to the American stage.
From a New York office Hellmer championed the European avant-garde — Brecht's epic theatre, the Theatre of the Absurd, and the work of Erwin Piscator — and represented playwrights and novelists across the postwar decades.
Before New York
The postwar agency had a Central European prehistory. In Vienna Hellmer worked as playreader for Twentieth Century-Fox and for the leading German-language play-publishing houses — Felix Bloch Erben and Drei-Masken-Verlag in Berlin, Georg Marton Verlag and Otto Eirich Verlag in Vienna — placing scripts across the German-speaking stage. The New York agency, opened after the war, carried that same brief in reverse: European drama and fiction placed with American publishers and Broadway houses.
Publishing house
Alongside the agency Hellmer was proprietor (Besitzer) of his own theatrical publishing house in New York, from which he licensed the German-language plays on his list. In the U.S. he also went by the name Curtis L. Hellmer.
Office Stamp
The rubber stamp Hellmer used on contracts, script covers, and outgoing mail from the agency's midtown office: Kurt Hellmer, Author's Representative, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York 17, N.Y. — telephone MUrray Hill 6-2222.
- Title
- Author's Representative
- Office
- 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York 17, N.Y.
- Telephone
- MU-6-2222
Max Frisch
Swiss playwright and novelist; Hellmer was his New York representative (The Firebugs, 1964).
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Swiss dramatist (The Visit, The Physicists); represented in the U.S. by Hellmer.
Bertolt Brecht
German dramatist and poet; among the German-language authors Hellmer placed with American publishers and theatres.
Sławomir Mrożek
Polish playwright of the absurd; U.S. representation from the early 1960s.
Jane Rule
For whom Hellmer secured publication of Desert of the Heart (1964) despite sustained resistance to the book.
Michael Noonan
Australian novelist and screenwriter; papers held at the National Library of Australia.
Jacob Picard
German-Jewish poet and prose writer in exile; papers at the Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History.
Alen Pol Kobryn
American poet whose work Hellmer was the first to represent.
George Bernard Shaw
Whose plays Hellmer produced in New York in the 1940s.
Gershon Einbinder
Yiddish novelist and children's writer better known by his pen name Chaver Paver; represented by the Hellmer agency in New York.