Broadcast · c. 1940 – 1941
The Theater of German Freemen — where Hellmer sat in the three-man management line at 507 Fifth Avenue — was not just a stage venture. Its founders wrote that the theater was 'not aimed just for fun and entertainment, but for a definite purpose to become a mighty effective anti-Nazi weapon, as well by means of the stage as by radio.'
"Furthermore the Theater is supposed to become not only the first Free German movement and will work as such as a fanfare, to be heard even in locked-up Germany of today, but will also help in the cultural reconstruction of a post-war world. The whole idea, as it looks to me, is promising in every respect, a cause well worth fighting for."
The Radio Studio
From the founding folder of the Theater of German Freemen: "The Theater has established a radio studio which broadcasts regularly in cooperation with the German 'Aufbau' Hour over Station WEVD New York. Until now plays by Goethe, Schiller, Brecht, Werfel, Koenigsgarten and others have been given."
Repertoire on Air
5 playwrights named
The playwrights the founders' folder singles out — Weimar classicism, Brecht's dissident modernism and living exile writers, all carried in German over WEVD's shortwave to a New York audience.
The canonical voice of German letters — Weimar classicism carried onto shortwave in exile.
Plays of freedom (Don Carlos, Wilhelm Tell) turned into anti-Nazi radio drama for a German-speaking New York audience.
The great living dissident dramatist, then in Scandinavian and eventually American exile.
Austrian playwright and novelist; also on the Theater of German Freemen advisory board.
Austrian playwright in New York exile — a contemporary voice of the émigré theater alongside the classics.
European P.E.N. Club
The European P.E.N. Club — the exiled writers' branch of International PEN — endorsed the enterprise in its founders' meeting resolution: "…to support all cultural efforts made by Europeans in America, such as the newly founded Theater of German Freemen."
WEVD
WEVD (call letters honouring the American socialist leader Eugene V. Debs) was the Yiddish- and multilingual-programming voice of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, owned by The Jewish Daily Forward. Its German-language block — the Aufbau Hour, tied to the exile newspaper edited by Manfred George — was the natural home for a broadcast wing of the Theater of German Freemen.
WHN · Refugee Theatre of the Air
In parallel, Hellmer directed short plays for Refugee Theatre of the Air, a weekly German-language series on New York's WHN. He named the programme in his 1939 letter to the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom — the earliest documented radio work in his New York years.