In the summer of 1914, the outbreak of war took the Circus E. Blumenfeld Wwe. by surprise. The regular visit to Posnan was hastily ended in the middle of the season. Within days, seven sons of the family responded to the call to arms. The chapiteau and most of the horses were expropriated for army use. The rest of the company barely made it back to their home base. This moment seemed to mark the tragic death of a Jewish circus enterprise that could look back on a history of more than one hundred years. Indeed, when the Blumenfeld family temporarily went “off the ring,” it was more than doubtful that they would ever be able to return to it.

The Blumenfelds were hardly alone in facing difficult circumstances, and in comparison, the situation of some related enterprises seemed even grimmer. The Strassburger and the Lorch families, for example, struggled with even more desperate problems in the first week of August. They had become trapped abroad. When the battles began, the Strassburgers had been touring Sweden, and the Lorch family was engaged in England. These circus families were used to moving, albeit not without difficulty, certainly with determination, across national borders. Their seasonal staff was recruited from all over the globe, a fact that almost sealed their fate in 1914. The Strassburgers, for example, lost overnight all of their Austrian, German, and French personnel to the front lines, putting future shows in doubt.