[3] He made his stage début in Meseritz and Speyer, and then toured Germany for two years, appearing at theatres in Zittau, Erfurt, Bremen,[3] Lucerne,[3] Gera,[3] and Frankfurt am Main.

[5] For three years between 1919 and 1922, Schreck appeared at the Munich Kammerspiele,[5] including a role in the expressionist production of Bertolt Brecht's début, Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) in which he played the "freakshow landlord" Glubb.

The company declared itself bankrupt after the film was released to avoid paying copyright infringement costs to the author's widow, Florence Stoker.

[5] While still in Munich, Schreck appeared in a 16-minute (one-reeler) slapstick, "surreal comedy" written by Bertolt Brecht with cabaret and stage actors Karl Valentin, Liesl Karlstadt, Erwin Faber, and Blandine Ebinger, entitled Mysterien eines Friseursalons (Mysteries of a Barbershop, 1923), directed by Erich Engel.

[2][5] Schreck's second collaboration with Nosferatu director F. W. Murnau was the comedy Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs (The Grand Duke's Finances, 1924).

[5] In 1926, Schreck returned to the Kammerspiele in Munich and continued to act in films, his career surviving the advent of sound until 1936, when he died from heart failure.

[2] The person and performance of Max Schreck in Nosferatu was fictionalised by actor Willem Dafoe in E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire.

[15] In the tabletop role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, members of the clan Nosferatu operate a secret computer network known as SchreckNET, named after Max Schreck.