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Chapter 13 - The Work of the Theater
- from Part II - Brecht’s Work
- Edited by Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
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- Bertolt Brecht in Context
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- 28 May 2021
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- 10 June 2021, pp 115-122
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Brecht the theater theoretician is better described as the theater practitioner. His innovative concepts that have come to mark the modern theater were the product of his reflections on the experiments and lessons he learned from his collaborative work in the theater and on the stage. In short, Brecht’s staging practices ground the “Brechtian” approach to theater, even though he never articulated a formal acting method, sometimes contradicted himself, and rarely recommended that actors or theater practitioners with whom he worked read his theoretical writings. This essay traces the development of key concepts around notions of nonmimetic realism and anti-illusionary theater that fed into the epic theater as well as his views of anti-consumerist spectatorship, produced in the theater through episodic structure, distancing or Verfremdung, historicization, and the social Gestus. The centrality of contradiction and dialectical thinking became for Brecht the basis of negation and imagining innovative forms in the theater for his political agenda of changing society, most clearly accomplished in his model of the Lehrstück or learning play aimed at the collective learning process of the actors.
15 - Too Near, Too Far: My GDR Story
- from Part III - The Personal Narrative: Storytelling in Acute Historical Moments
- Edited by Kristy R. Boney, Jennifer Marston William
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- Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
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- 12 April 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2018, pp 198-208
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I WANT TO TELL THE STORY of how I came to discover East Germany and to commit my professional life to the study of its culture. So this is an intellectual autobiography of sorts, not one that I claim to be representative but nonetheless one that might contribute to narrating the “story” of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a state that has disappeared from the map, and one that also might reveal the challenges we face in making sense of postwar German history. It is not the first time I look back at the GDR; at the last count this seems to be the sixth time in the past twenty-five years that I am stepping back and assessing where we stand vis-à-vis what seems to be a closed book, whose tattered cover I keep reopening. This repeated, perhaps even obsessive approach to the past has less to do with history than it does with the present, that is, how we see things now, retrospectively, at any given point in time. Thus I want to engage here in that double process of memory work: remembering and forgetting. For me to (re)construct the schemes and patterns that describe the changes, in particular the before and after of November 9, 1989, as I see them now, I need to locate myself, at the same time being aware that in order to tell a compelling story, I tend to erase the contingent and discontinuous quality of the past. So with this awareness, let me begin by reflecting on the GDR, which is situated for me somewhere between proximity and distance: at one and the same time too near and too far.
The story begins in late November 1989, when I received an airmail postcard from my dissertation advisor, who out of the blue wrote to ask what I thought about the collapse of the Berlin Wall and whether I would be changing careers as a result.
FM14 Session 2: Communicating Astronomy in our Changing World
- William H. Waller, Lina Canas, Hidehiko Agata, Hitoshi Yamaoka, Shigeyuki Karino, Davide Cenadelli, Andrea Ettore Bernagozzi, Jean Marc Christille, Matteo Benedetto, Matteo Calabrese, Paolo Calcidese, Richard Gelderman, Saeko S. Hayashi, Donald Lubowich, Thomas Madura, Carol Christian, David Hurd, Ken Silberman, Kyle Walker, Shannon McVoy, Robert Massey, Bogumił Radajewski, Maciej Mikołajewski, Krzysztof Czart, Iwona Guz, Adam Rubaszewski, Tomasz Stelmach, Rosa M. Ros, Ederlinda Viñuales, Beatriz Garca, Yuly E. Sánchez, Domínguez Santiago Vargas, Cesar Acosta, Nayive Rodríguez, Aswin Sekhar, Maria Sundin, Petra Andersson, Christian Finnsgård, Lars Larsson, Ron Miller, Akihiko Tomita, Yogesh Wadadekar
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- Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union / Volume 14 / Issue A30 / August 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 03 March 2020, pp. 528-530
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- August 2018
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As the IAU heads towards its second century, many changes have simultaneously transformed Astronomy and the human condition world-wide. Amid the amazing recent discoveries of exoplanets, primeval galaxies, and gravitational radiation, the human condition on Earth has become blazingly interconnected, yet beset with ever-increasing problems of over-population, pollution, and never-ending wars. Fossil-fueled global climate change has begun to yield perilous consequences. And the displacement of people from war-torn nations has reached levels not seen since World War II.
Chapter Fifteen
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 142-145
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On the Spanish border we were asked to open our suitcase and the handbag containing our toiletries. The customs officer was an old, lean, ash-gray man wearing leather gloves despite the heat. He searched the handbag, and, finding nothing that interested him, turned to the suitcase, in which there were 25 packs of cigarettes I was trying to smuggle. I had assumed that our miserable-looking emigrant's baggage wouldn't be searched. The French cigarettes were very cheap sincetabac noir, grown in France and Algiers, didn't appeal to the German occupying forces.
The suitcase was a treasure trove for the man. He felt inside and found two packs. Cigarettes were expensive in Spain, and the Spanish love black tobacco. The man went into a state of feverish excitement. He emptied the entire contents with trembling hands and turned every piece of clothing inside-out, stacking the cigarettes in a pile to the left. We were standing to his right. Our son Wolfgang stood between the handbag and the suitcase, in front of the growing mountain of cigarettes. After watching for a short time, he slowly and calmly slid a few of the packs into the already searched handbag. The man didn't notice him, he was too busy searching the lining of the suitcase. We couldn't give our son a sign to stop immediately, for this would have caught the man's attention. We watched in agonized fear. We had heard that the Border Control, aware of its indisputable power, could take away an emigrant's papers at any provocation, calling one of the guards massed around the checkpoint to take the victim to a Spanish detention camp.
The man looked up just as Wolfgang shut the handbag. He confiscated the cigarettes left on the table and marked the suitcase with chalk. We took our baggage and crossed the checkpoint into Spain with half of my cigarettes.
Barcelona with its bright lights and display windows amazed us aft er the wartime blackout of the French cities.
Chapter Three
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 19-23
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I saw the political and social changes as if through a mist. A single thought excited me: my school years and my military service were over, and I had an entire life to spend however I wanted.
During the war I had been in charge of bringing two troop transports to General-von-Pape-Straße in Berlin, and during the trip I had been able to fulfill my greatest wish: I'd attended a [Max] Reinhardt production at the German Theater. I saw Othello with Paul Wegener in the title role. It was a brilliant performance in many respects, but it failed to attain the full scope and substance of Shakespearean drama, and I was disappointed. The second time, I went to a production of Wedekind's Earth Spirit on the Königgrätzerstraße stage, with Ludwig Hartau in the role of Dr. Schön. Wegener's Othello had been the product of meticulous intellectual craft smanship; Hartau was the first great actor I ever saw on stage. He was the decisive encounter for the direction my career was to take, a direction I'd first perceived in the clattering phonograph, in Marcel Salzer, and in the readings with my friends of the literary group. I wanted to be an actor. The only thing standing in my way was my father.
I signed a contract with a traveling theater for the roles of the youthful bon vivant. The director may have believed what I said about having performed small parts with the Posen City Theater, but he hired me for the good clothes I owned. Elegant civilian dress was very expensive and hard to come by after the war. I kept putting off mentioning the enterprise to my father, and the family discussions of where I would start my medical studies—wartime volunteers who had finished their high school education were exempted from admissions exams—continued harmoniously. When I finally told my father that I had decided to pursue a career on stage, and that I had already signed a contract, he laughed and walked out of the room. I got my suitcase and began to pack.
Chapter Sixteen
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 146-163
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The Statue of Liberty had been invisible to me in the yellow haze. I had also been unable to admire the famous city skyline, the silhouetted skyscrapers, because we had docked not in Manhattan but at a narrow, dirty pier in Brooklyn. The ship moved very slowly, almost standing still. I bent over the railing and saw a stream of used condoms float by in the brackish water. Then we halted. On the pier below us stood the theater critic of the Berlin Montag Morgen, Julius Bab, his long black beard lifting in the wind. I sat down on my suitcase. There was no going back. Emissaries from charity organizations came on board and offered lodging to passengers without money or a place to stay. After long formalities with the immigration officials, we stepped off the boat and into a taxi.
We drove through Brooklyn and over the endless, gloomy Brooklyn Bridge, oppressive to me with its thousands of tons of iron. Berlin's Kantstraße may not have been the height of beauty, nor certainly the sooty streets of industrial Upper Silesia, but the houses here, put up hastily for a quick profit, with their exposed fi re escapes attached to the façades and shapeless rooftop water tanks, were of a penetrating ugliness. The wide, flat faces of pedestrians, without the nuance of shadow and seeming to have no secret hidden behind them, were alien to me. All of these impressions came to me through the sticky, foul-smelling air and were altogether too much to take; I covered my eyes. It became clear later, through conversations with others, that the immigrants who had come directly from Berlin had an easier time adjusting to New York than those accustomed to the architectural harmony of Paris and to French living.
Our taxi let us off on upper Broadway in front of a small hotel. I stepped onto the street and a man pushed a printed flier into my hand. It was June 1941. Since I didn't understand a word of English—my high school studies had been in Latin, Greek, and French as a minor—I asked our friends who met us at the ship to translate.
Chapter Seventeen
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 164-169
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For months it was impossible to find vacancies on a regular passenger ship, because so many of them had been refitted for troop transport during the war. Some had been released unmodified for passenger service, and we booked two berths. The ship had a single accommodations plan: food and service were the same for every passenger. The cabins on the two upper decks were reserved for American and British passengers, who had won the war; on the middle decks were the Scandinavians and the Swiss, whom the war had made rich. Below were the liberated French, the Italians, the Irish, and the stateless, my son and I. We still weren't US citizens, though we carried a re-entry permit.
The Italians aboard the ship had worked and saved for this trip home, where they made a prince's appearance in their villages and spent one or two hundred dollars in four weeks. Then they went back to America to begin saving for the next trip. Now the time had come again to see their relatives and to be the object of their amazement. Shortly before our arrival, they packed their cabin bedding as travel gift s.
We had sailed for 18 days on calm seas under a bright autumn sun, and were approaching Ireland. Twenty four hours before arriving, the side of the deck from which land could first be sighted was scattered with whisky bottles. A group of older Irishmen and women, who hadn't seen their home in ages, were now returning. We stopped on the high sea, a launch took them away, and we continued through the English Channel. Th e sun went down. We were scheduled to dock at Le Havre early the next morning. In the night, someone woke me. I got dressed. We went on deck and the man pointed off in a direction, then left me alone. The ship moved forward slowly. I saw two distant searchlights cut the dark sky. They were shining from Europe, from France. I cried a little.
Chapter Nineteen
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 175-176
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We landed in Berlin, coming from Nice. For six months we had lived an easy life on the Riviera. My son had rented an apartment for us in the quiet Quartier des Musiciens, ten minutes from the ocean. We had begun to think about staying in Nice when a letter came from Toni Mackeben in Berlin. It was an answer to the single letter we had written to Germany. Her letter was full of joy over our friendship. Both my wife and I are unable to resist human warmth, and we decided to visit Toni and stay for three days in Berlin.
We took the train to Munich. In Milan, a man took a seat in our empty compartment and spoke to us in German—a big event. For twenty years we had spoken and been spoken to in a foreign language.
Toni was waiting for us at the airport in Tempelhof. We embraced. We brought our luggage to the hotel, then drove to her apartment through the gloom of the poorly lit city. Ruins alternated with rubble heaps. Entire streetcar lines were torn up. And yet the shock wasn't there yet. I could still sleep that night.
The next morning, in daylight, we walked through once familiar streets whose houses all had vanished. At the cramped corner stores, shashlik and sausage were being sold, and the smell of cheap fat mixed with plaster dust was everywhere. We looked for Lützowplatz, which no longer existed. I saw, through the iron curtain, the ghostly landscape of the Potsdamer Platz. The horror of it overcame me. I sat up in bed at night wracked by a nervous cough. I wanted to leave, but I didn't know where to go. I had found my language again. I stayed in this half-Berlin with its visible scars, its deformed face and its sad charm and optimism, like that of the severely wounded who are happy to have gotten away with their lives.
Chapter Eleven
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 102-111
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September 1939 arrived. The Germans invaded Poland; the French and the English declared war. It was the third of September, 1939, a date that will always have its place in the history lessons.
For us emigrants and our families, who had finally begun to settle in France and to stand on new ground, that ground now began to shake. A few days after the declaration of war, there was an order for the men to appear before the police commissioner. “You understand that you are all German citizens. Are you ready to declare yourselves refugees and to fight for France?” The first part was no longer accurate, since we were one and all completely expatriated. We were between two empty chairs, and glad to be allowed to balance on the edge of the French one. We signed without exception.
“Ne perdez pas cettefiche, Monsieur,” the official said when he handed me the confirmation slip, “Vousêtes maintenant presque Français.”—Do not lose this piece of paper, sir, you are almost a Frenchman now.
Notices were posted the next day ordering our relocation, with a blanket and three days’ food, to the stadium at Colombes. We used all our connections to find out what was in store for us. The prominent French figures we knew, themselves surprised by the outbreak of the war and uncertain about their own situations, advised us to go, that this could be nothing more than a sifting process by which the authorities hoped to identify and remove suspicious elements.
So I drove to Colombes. A legion of men holding small suitcases was lined up in silent rows. An atmosphere of terrible disappointment, as stifling as the heat and the dust, settled over these thousands standing in rows of four, to whom their beloved France had first offered asylum and on whom it now turned as its enemy.
We began to fear the worst. Rumors circulated that no one would be allowed to keep knives, scissors, or razorblades. Why such things should be taken from men who were about to be “sift ed” was unclear to me. I asked one of my groupmates, Tommy. He didn't answer. Again I sensed a familiar tautness in the area of my diaphragm.
Chapter One
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 1-14
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I was born at the end of last century in Beuthen, Upper Silesia, in the Bahnhofstrasse, where the first grenades of the Second World War fell, according to military reports. From my early childhood I remember this single incident: I was jumping on my parents’ bed, and I came down on one of the edges with my nose. I buried my face in a pillow. When I lifted my head, I saw a bloodstain. I tried it again, touched my head lightly here and there on the white pillowcase, saw several bloodstains, was struck with revulsion, and began to cry. Since then, blood has always terrified me.
Probably with the idea of overcoming this fear, I once went to the slaughterhouse and watched as a cow was hit with a hammer and stabbed to death. Horrified, I dropped my Gaius Julius Caesar (I was carrying my schoolbooks under my arm) in a puddle of blood. I fi shed it out quickly; the fear that I'd ruined a schoolbook was greater than the disgust. I washed it off at a fountain, and, as all schoolbooks at that time were wrapped in blue wax paper, I replaced the cover at home.
When I was four years old, we moved to the neighboring town of Gleiwitz. Two more brothers were born there. Each birth was connected with the appearance of another wet nurse. The wet nurses came from the country and were dressed in peasant clothing. They wore several skirts one on top of the other, with long jackets over them, buttoned in front, three-quarters length in bright calico. On Sundays their jackets were silk, trimmed with a hand's breadth of lace at the bottom. The wet nurses were young and buxom. One often saw them drinking large quantities of milk and malt beer, a practice required for the increase of their milk. Their smell was sweet and womanly. They stayed and nursed the infants from three to six months, and came to each of the children's birthdays afterwards, where they received a gift of a gold piece. My wet nurse's name was Valeska Kroker. With her earnings she bought herself gold eyeteeth.
And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
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- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp xv-xviii
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Chapter Ten
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 91-101
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The old emigrant life of suitcases, threadbare and bulging with one's entire belongings, began again for me in a small Paris hotel in the Rue Galilée. One of the first to come in search of me was the film director Max Ophüls. He came with the idea of convincing me how impossible it would be to find a foothold in Paris as a theater manager, and to advise me to consider producing films instead. Perfect fluency in French would not be necessary in this line; Russian and Hungarian producers emigrated from Berlin had already found an audience. They all spoke at least four languages, fluently and full of mistakes. Aware of my dislike for the cinema, he tempted me with a strange project: making Schiller's Love and Intrigue into a French fi lm. I was happy to have a project so soon, and I went about the unpleasant task of raising the necessary funds. Through a recommendation, I made contact with the son of the Swedish multimillionaire [Olof] Aschberg. He received me in his father's sprawling mansion in the Rue Casimir Périer flanked by two elegant secretaries. He was very interested. We went to dinner with Ophüls. Ophüls and I wrote a treatment and Aschberg liked it. Ophüls fl ew to London and hired the famous French movie star Annabella, who was filming there at the time. When he told her the story of Luise and Ferdinand, she said with tears in her eyes, “C'est trop beau!” and signed. It began as beautifully as an old-fashioned fi lm, and ended, unfortunately, as badly as a modern one.
A telegram from the same woman who had first put me in contact with Aschberg's son now summoned the old man himself to Paris. The telegram warned of the treachery of Ophüls and Aufricht. The woman, who was in financial difficulties, assumed that we'd already received our money and were now intending to withhold her finder's fee. The elder Aschberg had already dealt with several trying episodes on his son's account, and when he heard of the latest plans for filming, the kettle boiled over.
Chapter Nine
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 87-90
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In the Province of Calvados, where the apple brandy of the same name is produced, where tall hedges separate lush meadows, and the moist, mild sea climate keeps the marshland grasses green almost all year long, I found a dainty Louis XV castle with a farmyard and pigeon-house, a park and a pond. The property had been mostly untouched for 150 years, and had a symmetry and harmony with nature that one often finds in the Romance cultures. I turned the place into an educational farm, primarily for students who wanted to be retrained as farmhands. An impatient son of friends of ours didn't want to wait until we came to Petiville, the small place in Calvados, and I agreed to let him travel ahead of us to the farm, which was still unoccupied by people or animals. He was one of the many young emigrants from Paris whose family had lost the means to keep their children in school, and who, having grown tired of inactivity, were looking eagerly for ways to learn a new set of professional skills. Overjoyed, he telephoned his parents and described the landscape and the sea to them, and in particular two tame, white ducks he had discovered upon his arrival at the farm. These two birds, I later explained to the parents, had lived many years on the lake at Petiville. They were geese, incidentally, and not ducks. “Please don't tell him,” the mother said. “It would upset him. He wants so much to be a farmer.”
We moved to Petiville and sent for our children, who had gone back to Germany once more to live for a short time with their grandparents and attend school in Hangelsberg. When we met them at the station they carried, under their jackets, belts with swastikas and daggers with blood grooves engraved on the clasp, and a National Socialist songbook. We sunk these objects in the pond.
I began to populate the farm with people and livestock. I hired a German emigrant with a diploma in agronomy, a Russian emigrant French teacher, a French master gardener with assistants, a milkmaid and a cook native to the region. I bought a draft -horse, pigs, and an old, hulking Buick for animal, human and vegetable transport.
Chapter Seven
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 74-82
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Between 1931 and 1932, the death of the theater began in Berlin. What no one would have thought possible: Max Reinhardt gave up his five theaters and went to Vienna. The Rotter Brothers, leaseholders of many playhouses, fled from their debts to Liechtenstein. Long established theater managers vanished. Piscator at the Nollendorfplatz had given up early on, as had Charell at the Große Schauspielhaus. Heinrich Neft of the Volksbühne, proud never to have received a subsidy, was forced to ask the City of Berlin to support his Theater am Bülowplatz with 300,000 marks a year. Temporary engagements, some of which lasted no more than a single month, played to empty houses.
I ended my lease with the owners of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm at the end of the 1931 season. The summer with its huge expenses, the theater's location in the dead central city, and the scarcity of appealing plays helped me in my resolve to leave. Our profits were a third of what they had been, and the wages for a stage actor boosted sky-high by the advent of sound fi lm. There were only isolated, sensational hits, and only three stars, [Elisabeth] Bergner, Richard Tauber and Hans Albers, could fi ll an auditorium.
The economic crisis intensified; unemployment was at four million. The Deutsche Bank closed its counters. In order to prevent a rush of panic, the banks and the savings and loan institutions limited withdrawals to 200 marks for a time.
I founded the Ernst Joseph Aufricht Production Company following the American, or the English, model. No longer obligated to enforce the daily rise of the curtain, I could take time to find a suitable play, one that could be cast as its roles demanded. I could try out a play in the provinces, then choose any one of the distressed theaters in Berlin. Size and character of an auditorium are important elements in the success of a production.
I rented a ground floor space at Kantstraße 162, on the corner of Joachimstaler Straße, and arranged my office there. Returning in 1954 I would find as my successors to these rooms the “Remde's St. Pauli” nightclub and striptease.
Chapter Two
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 15-18
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Most of my friends, one or two years older than me, had already gone into the army as wartime volunteers. They came home in their uniforms to bask in the city's admiration, and waited impatiently for their assignments to the front. I had enlisted for the light cavalry at the outbreak of the war, and had concealed that I was only fifteen (the minimum age was sixteen), but my father found out and prevented me from going. Twelve months later I said to him: “If the war ends and I wasn't there, I'll shoot myself right in front of you!” This time he gave me permission to volunteer for service. Because infantry had the heaviest losses, men were being turned away from other divisions and referred to this one. I had my heart set on cavalry. A schoolmate of mine who had come home on furlough informed me that the field-artillery regiment Nr. 20 in Posen was still enlisting. I reported, passed my physical exam in Gleiwitz and got my mobilization order.
My mother sobbed when I left. My father accompanied me to Posen. We ate a silent dinner at the hotel where we had stopped. The next morning he invited me in an uncharacteristic way to take a walk with him. I saw that something was weighing heavily on him. After a few halting starts he managed to explain to me that soldiers sometimes come down with a kind of infection, a sexual disease. If it should happen to me, he said, he didn't want me to be ashamed and keep it secret, but to tell him. We walked back to the hotel, called for our bags and took a coach to the recruitment depot at Fort Grolman. Formerly this had been a part of a network of fortified outposts; it was surrounded by a high wall and generally made a hard and bleak impression. The cab stopped in front of a gate with a posted sentry. I got out and took my suitcase, said “Goodbye,” nothing more, and walked toward the gate.
Chapter Eight
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
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- 07 September 2018
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- 01 June 2018, pp 83-86
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My emigration began in March 1933 in Zürich. The opulence and the security of this beautiful city made me uneasy, as I began to understand what was ahead of me. The marvelously funny and intelligent entertainer from the Comedians’ Cabaret in Berlin, Paul Nikolaus, summed up his situation at one of the many exiles’ tables:
“As a political comedian in the German language, I can perform in Zürich and in Basel for fourteen days each a year. My money will last me at the most two years. Why should I wait for the time to pass?” He said goodnight, went home and slit his wrists.
I didn't stay long in Zürich but left for Czechoslovakia to meet my wife and our two small boys, accompanied by a nanny (a luxury that wasn't to last much longer). We decided that I should go on to Paris and leave the family behind temporarily, at a boarding house. During my time at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm I had declined the offer of an exchange guest appearance with the Théâtre Pitoeff, as I'd felt that the only theater for me was in Berlin. Now I had to try to persuade myself that the Parisian theater was waiting for me.
The train stopped in the Gare du Nord, and I broke a shoelace as I was getting off. At the hotel, I found that I couldn't express to the house servant that I needed “de lacets noirs”; I could only show him the damaged lace and grin at him. He grinned back at me and disappeared. I threw the torn shoelace, in my confidence that it would be replaced, into a bin from which it couldn't be retrieved. I waited in vain for the man to come back. I began to comprehend that I was reduced to an infant, or an imbecile, in this place where I couldn't make myself understood, and I began to realize the extent of my misfortune.
Chapter Six
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
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- Book:
- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2018, pp 35-73
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Summary
“Mr. Herzfeld will see you now.” The banker received me in his private office, Unter den Linden 21.
“Your father has credited you for 100,000 marks with us. He has also given me instructions to deposit 50,000 marks security in your name at the Police Headquarters, and to guarantee your lease of the Theater am Schiffb auerdamm from its owners. Please be so kind as to follow me.”
He led me into a bathroom and put his hand on the flusher. “I can pay you the sum in cash. If you throw it in here and pull”—he pulled the cord—“then it's gone, and so are your worries. If you open a theater with it, then it's also gone, but you have a big problem on your hands.” I thanked him and transferred my money to another bank. I had no nerves, at the time, for that kind of joke. On my way home I bought a small blue notebook as a temporary ledger. I sat down with it at my writing desk and entered: “Blue notebook … 5 pfennig.”
I now had a theater in Berlin that had to open in nine months. I offered Erich Engel, whom I consider to have been the most important director of the twenties, the production of the first play. He was interested, and we met at the bar of the Hotel Bristol, where he did most of his work, in order to discuss which play it would be. I remember his first suggestion, to hire a star cast for Wedekind's Spring Awakening, a work which at that time was seen as revolutionary and aggressive. I decided against the project; it was the kind of thing better suited to Reinhardt's intimate theater. We considered one of the chapters in The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus, and rejected it. This long book was written for the reader and not the stage—the characters have no theatrical life. Later, I acted in a studio performance of “The Last Night,” from the same work. Despite much admiration from the press and the ambitious literary public, it never became part of the regular repertoire.
Chapter Fourteen
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
-
- Book:
- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2018, pp 136-141
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Summary
First thing the next morning I went to Abbé Scolardi. As before, he offered me a glass of Vieux Marc. We drank, he put on his flat, round priest's hat, and we left for the Police Prefecture.
“Give me your papers and wait here,” he said to me outside, “I don't want to have another scene like last time.” I waited, and a few minutes later he came back with a permit for my temporary residence in Marseille. He wouldn't hear any thanks. If I ever wanted to drink a Marc I should pay him a visit.
I stood on the street of a big city, a legal resident. First I bought cigarettes. Then I sat down on a café terrace near the Vieux Port and ordered a cognac; the coffee still available in France was of poor quality. I listened to the city noise, saw the crowds of people and once again felt myself one of them. My wife and son were to arrive that afternoon. Maybe, I thought, we could live an almost normal life here for a few weeks or even a few months. The single, painful worry pursued us, that since the time of my wife's departure from Paris we'd heard nothing from our older son Heinz in England.
The suburbs were full of emigrants; there wasn't a bed free in Marseille. A constant stream of refugees swept through the city. I went to the Hotel Aumage, whose owner I knew from my last stay.
“You're in luck,” he greeted me, “a room opened up just this morning. The woman was a refugee, she had a fight with a German fellow, he injured her. They took her to the hospital.” I learned later that the man was from the Gestapo, and the woman the sister of a former Berlin fi lm producer. She had told him about a safe in Zürich, he had demanded the combination and the key, and had hit her in the face with a chair when she refused to give him either one. They found her blind and unconscious. The bloodstains on the fl oor were not yet dry when we moved in.
Chapter Five
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
-
- Book:
- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2018, pp 29-34
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Summary
In 1923, the director Berthold Viertel and I founded The Troupe in Berlin, with Viertel as Managing Director and myself as Assistant Director. The dramaturg was Heinrich Fischer, recommended to us by Siegfried Jacobsohn, Editor of The Stage (later called The World Stage).
The inflAtion gathered speed. Actors went over to fi lm for some degree of security against the daily devaluation. Members of The Troupe agreed to a contract of one year, during which time they were not allowed to shoot a single day of fi lm. They worked, one and all, for equal pay and a dividend of the theater's net profit per season. Why they did this is hard to understand today. They were seasoned professionals who didn't take on only one engagement at a time, but signed contracts with several first-rate theaters: Rudolf Forster, Sybille Binder, Fritz Kortner, his wife Johanna Hofer, Lothar Müthel, Heinz Hilpert, Aribert Wäscher, Leonhard Steckel, Erna Schöller, Paul Bildt, and Walter Franck, among others. The revolutionary goal of The Troupe was to build an ensemble that made no commercial concessions, that didn't call itself a “star theater,” and that didn't tolerate filming during the season. Our business manager was a State Theater civil servant who had cancelled his contract, with pension rights, in order to come to us. He was married, had children, and owned a house with a garden in a Berlin suburb. He was small and unprepossessing. When he smiled, he revealed a blue front tooth that gave his expression a certain morbidity.
After a few months of balancing our empty accounts and struggling in vain with the financial chaos, created in part by our director's artistic fanaticism with night rehearsals and the delays these caused, the business manager finally left us. He sold his house and garden and leased the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in order to launch his girlfriend, a lousy soprano. He let his correctly trimmed hair grow long, took to carrying a monocle on a black band, went broke in two months, and hanged himself.
Chapter Twelve
- from And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Ernst Josef Aufricht, Benjamin Bloch, Marc Silberman
-
- Book:
- And the Shark, He Has Teeth
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 September 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2018, pp 112-116
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There was a blackout through Paris in anticipation of air raids. Lanterns burned with dark purple bulbs—“les violets,” Colette called them—to help people find their way, and many walked around with gasmasks hanging from their shoulders. Motortraffi c, decreased day by day due to fuel rationing, had been replaced by a flod of pedestrians. Life became frenzied under the pall of the blackout. The desire for food and amusement had never been so strong, and the usually thrift y French now filled the theaters, cinemas, and restaurants to overflowing. At the same time, a mental paralysis spread over the country. The two armies lay entrenched, facing each other. In this “Drôle de guerre,” the phony war, as people called it, there was no fighting. Everyone wanted to believe it could stay this way, and knew that it couldn't.
We who had been released were mistrustful. We felt sure we would be re-imprisoned immediately if the war took a sudden nasty turn. As long as I was outside of the camp, I had to find a way to protect myself from a second internment. Was there some way to install myself somewhere in a civil occupation? I had the idea of making myself useful at the Ministry of Propaganda. According to what I could find out, there were plans to produce French propaganda for the Latin American republics.
I contacted the screenplay writer Hans Jacoby and asked him if he had any material that could be reworked into a Spanish language propaganda fi lm. Jacoby had immigrated to Spain in 1933, and had then been forced to move to France as a result of the civil war. He understood immediately why I had turned to him. Of course he had a Spanish-French love story. Fitted with a heroic background, it would be ideal for export to South America.
The Ministry of Propaganda had established its base in the Hotel Continental, Rue de Rivoli. Madame Ninon Tallon, who was connected to all government offices through her uncle Edouard Herriot, long-time president of the Chamber of Deputies, came with me.