“I Prefer to Write Biographies”: Remembering Barbara Berger (1944–2024)

Anna Chojnacka

Abstract

Barbara Berger, a theatre historian and graduate of the University of Warsaw, devoted her entire professional life to the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. While still a student, she collaborated with Słownik biograficzny teatru polskiego (The Polish Theatre Biographical Dictionary), and after completing her studies in 1969, she was employed at the Department of Theatre History and Theory. She worked on all volumes of the Dictionary (the last one was published in 2017), containing biographies of theatre people from the foundation of the national stageto the end of the 20th century. She collected information, wrote and edited entries, made corrections and did proof-reading. In the early 2000s, she wrote down the rules for creating dictionary biographies. This extensive note (included in the Appendix) not only presents the structure and contents of the entries, but also shows the scope of research, the details of the findings, and the problems that the editorial team had to solve. In the 1970s, Barbara Berger joined the team of Almanach Sceny Polskiej (The Polish Stage Almanac), documenting successive seasons of theatre life in Poland. Until the end of the yearbook’s publication (vol. 49, 2013), she prepared biographies of actors and directors, singers and dancers, set designers, literary managers and theatre directors. Occasionally, she wrote and consulted biographical entries of theatre artists for other publishing houses. She is the author and editor of hundreds of biographies of theatre people. Work was her passion.