Ernst Stern

Ernst Stern (1 April 1876 – 28 August 1954) was a Romanian-German scenic designer that through his collaborations with most of the prominent German directors of the early Twentieth century helped define the look of Expressionism in both the theatre and the cinema.

Born in Bucharest, Romania, to Jewish parents of German and Hungarian origin, Stern studied under Nikolaos Gyzis and Franz Stuck at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich beginning in 1894.

Stern moved to Berlin in 1905, where Max Reinhardt hired him the next year as a set designer for the Deutsches Theater. He remained Reinhardt's main design collaborator until the director's departure in 1921 and designed roughly ninety shows during that time, with notable works including adaptations of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1907), Hamlet (1909), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1913), Karl Vollmöller's The Miracle (1911), Reinhard Sorge's The Beggar (1917), and Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman (1917).

Under Reinhardt, the Deutsches Theater became a center of German Expressionist Theater, so Stern designed many sets in that style. As Stern's design aesthetics tended towards serenity and realism, however, this pairing was not always successful. Perhaps his most noteworthy expressionist work was Paul Leni's 1924 silent film Waxworks (1924), for which he designed the costumes. Stern collaborated at some point with nearly all the important German film directors of the period, including F.W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Richard Oswald, Carl Froelich, and William Dieterle.

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