Peter Iden

Peter Iden was born on 11 September 1938 in Meseritz, in the Prussian province of Grenzmark Posen-West Prussia, now Miedzyrzecz in Poland. At the end of the Second World War his family fled the Red Army into the British occupation zone and settled in Lauenburg on the Elbe, where he grew up and attended the classical branch of the Johanneum grammar school in Luneburg. From 1955 he spent two years with a host family in California.

He then moved to Frankfurt am Main, where his grandfather owned a construction company, and took his Abitur at the Helmholtzschule in 1958. At the Goethe University he studied philosophy, history and theatre studies, hearing Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, though the neo-Kantian Wolfgang Cramer made the deepest impression on him. He continued his studies at the University of Vienna, drawn by the archive of Richard Honigswald, and there became friends with the avant-garde artists Arnulf Rainer and Markus Prachensky.

Encouraged by the arts editor Erich Lissner, Iden began writing for the Frankfurter Rundschau in 1961. At about the same time he met the director Erwin Piscator, became his assistant and travelled with him through Germany for two years. Inspired by Piscator, he and the theatre publisher Karlheinz Braun ran Experimenta at Frankfurt's Theater am Turm from 1966 to 1971, regarded as one of the first international festivals of experimental theatre in Germany. In 1972 he was on the organising committee of Documenta 5, curated by Harald Szeemann, and staged an Experimenta there with Braun.

From 1978 to 1987 he worked with Heinrich Klotz and Hilmar Hoffmann on founding the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and served as its founding director. In 1981 he secured part of the collection of the Darmstadt entrepreneur Karl Stroher, 87 paintings, sculptures, objects and environments of American Pop and Minimal Art and important European artists, which formed the museum's core.

From 1982 he was professor of theatre and art theory at the Hochschule fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt and head of its drama department. At the Frankfurter Rundschau he wrote more than 3,000 articles as theatre and art critic, became a senior editor and led the arts section from 1993 to 2000. In 2009 he was spokesman for the curators of the exhibition Sixty Years. Sixty Works, on art of the Federal Republic, at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The Salzburger Nachrichten described him as a mentor of art for Salzburg, having accompanied the Salzburg Foundation's art projects as a curator.

His books include Gesellschaft, was ist das? (1985), Warum wir das Theater brauchen (1995), Vom Gluck, ein Kunstler zu sein (2009), Der verbrannte Schmetterling (2010) and Die Macht der Bilder (2019), a collection of his writing on contemporary art from 1962 to 2019.

Iden lived in Frankfurt am Main and on Lake Garda in Italy. He was a member of the German PEN Centre from 1972. His death was announced by his daughter.

Peter Iden died on the evening of 11 November 2026 in Frankfurt am Main, at the age of 88. His daughter announced the death the following day, and it was reported by the Salzburger Nachrichten, whose arts editor Hedwig Kainberger remembered him as a mentor of art for Salzburg. The cause of death was not made public.

Iden shaped Frankfurt's cultural landscape as a critic, festival organiser and museum founder. The Museum fur Moderne Kunst, built on the Stroher works he acquired in 1981, opened in Hans Hollein's building in 1991. Experimenta helped bring international experimental theatre to West Germany, and his decades of criticism for the Frankfurter Rundschau were collected in several volumes. He was honoured with the Goethe Plaque of the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art in 1995 and the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt in 2006.