Alexander Moissi, a Berliner from Itally and Albania

Alexander Moissi, a Berliner ? But he was born in Trieste, an Italian town belonging to Austria-Hungary. But his native name was Aleksandër Moisiu, an Albanian name, as his father had those origins. But his theatrical debut – because Moissi-Moissiu was an actor, a great actor at that – was not in Berlin but in Vienna and in Prague. So, why should we consider him, of all possible things, a Berliner ?

Because in 1903, at 24, he joined the Deutsches Theater in the capital of the German Reich. There, he became a protégé of the influential director Max Reinhardt. From then on, his meteoric career developed in Berlin, with occasional appearances in Russia and in the United States. 

Alexander Moissi, a name today forgotten, made women's hearts beat faster in the first decades of the twentieth century, as did Enrico Caruso and Rudolf Valentino. Moissi led the life of a pop star, a Casanova and an adventurer. In contemporary pieces by Ibsen, Wedekind and Pirandello, he played modern characters – young, strife-torn, depravity-seeking men. But he also excelled in classical plays by Shakespeare and Tolstoy. 
 

No one died on stage as often and as beautifully as Moissi. He was between 1910 and 1930 the most famous and maybe the first truly modern actor in German-speaking theatre. His biographer Rüdiger Schaper writes that Moissi "personified the moment when psychology broke into art."

Unlike most of the great German actors before him, Moissi was not a native German speaker. He was born in Albania and grew up speaking Greek and Italian. In none of his performances did he lose his Mediterranean inflection. But that did not diminish his stature; it enhanced it. 
 

Max Reinhardt "discovered" Moissi and initiated his transformation from a provincial cafe singer to an international star. Reinhardt liked Moissi’s accent. He liked the chutzpa in speaking that exotic way before a Berlin audience. Reinhardt often cast foreigners—Hungarians, Russians, Poles, even Americans—because the director sought an alternative to “high German” stage speech.

Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig were enthusiastic about Moissi, though Franz Kafka was less impressed.

Moissi was the archetypical cosmopolitan character, as was Stefan Zweig. But whereas Zweig, though speaking several languages and moving freely across Europe, was nevertheless an Austrian national, Moissi’s national identity was richer and more complex. He was born 1879 in the harbour city of Trieste, Italy’s most international, under Austrian rule at that time. His father was Albanian (then a province of the Ottoman empire), He was thus an Austrian of Italian-Albanian origin, who later became a German actor. 

In Berlin, he was a protégé of Max Reinhardt. However, Moissi did not keep up with later theatrical movements, initiated by Bertolt Brecht or by Erwin Piscator

In 1914, he acquired German citizenship to become a volunteer in World War I, and during the German Revolution of 1918–19 joined the Marxist Spartacus League.

Although a Christian, Moissi was often labeled as Jewish due to his name. He wasn’t, but he was a starch enemy of anti-semitism.The arrival of the Nazis to power put an end to his career.

He died in 1935.