In February 1914, Wolf Dohrn died in a skiing accident in the Alps. After the First World War broke out, Jaques-Dalcroze never returned from Geneva. The internationally influential Festival Theatre fell victim to history – for the first time. There were many attempts to continue its teaching in music and rhythmics and retain the site’s experimental nature – Carl Theill and Alexander S. Neill started a reformist school project in the Festival Theatre, for instance – but the myth and attraction of an exciting new form of stagecraft, with all its artistic and social implications, had been shattered. By the mid-1930s the National Socialists had disfigured the complex by adding rooms and extensions, partly demolishing and rebuilding the guest houses and misusing the site as a police school. When the Russian army moved into the Festival Theatre after the Second World War and replaced the yin and yang emblem with the red star, the “legend of Hellerau" lingered only in the memories of those who had once set off to help build a new, better community there.
