The Archive of the Habima Secretariat: Margot Klausner and the Making of a National Stage

In 1935, the relationship between Margot Klausner and Habima, now the National Theater of Israel, and at the time a prestigious Hebrew troupe operating as a collective of actors, ran into a severe crisis. The contentious termination of Klausner?s collaboration with Habima marked her disappearance from the history of Hebrew theater. Klausner left a large archival corpus that documents her managerial activity at the Habima secretariat and at the theater?s philanthropic organizations, yet her absence from the history of the National Theater of Israel also affected the poor handling of her archive. These documents, written mostly in German and dating from the years 1927 to 1935, remained uncatalogued and closed to researchers and the wider public for decades, until the inauguration of the project ?Traces and Treasures of German-Jewish History in Israel,?, a joint project of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. This article examines the rediscovered archival corpus, aiming to restore Klausner and her deeds to the history of Hebrew theater and to understand how this archival corpus challenges and reshapes our understanding of Habima?s history.