Alexander Granach

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Alexander Granach ; actually Jessaja Gronach , until 1912 Hermann Gronach (born April 18, 1890 in Werbowitz , Horodenka district , East Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; † March 14, 1945 in New York City , USA ) was a German - Austrian actor .

Life

Berlin memorial plaque on the house, Heiligendammer Strasse 17a, in Berlin-Schmargendorf

Granach was born the ninth child of a Jewish farming family in a Galician shtetl . Shortly after his birth, his father became a baker in the small town of Horodenka . After completing an apprenticeship as a baker , Granach came into contact with Russian-Jewish students and sympathized with the revolutionary movement in Russia . In Lviv he first visited the Yiddish theater with his brother and decided to become an actor.

In 1906 he came to Berlin via Vienna , where he initially earned his living as a baker. On the side, he joined a Yiddish amateur theater , where he gained his first acting experience. Since he spoke only fragments of German, he had to learn the German language from scratch.

When he started at Max Reinhardt's drama school in 1912 , it was the beginning of a successful theater and later film career. He appeared as a replacement for a sick colleague in Shakespeare's Hamlet and was first noticed. Over the next twenty years, he established himself as a great theater mime, only in the years 1914 to 1918 his career was the convening in the Austro-Hungarian army interrupted. During the First World War he fought on the Alpine front on the border with Italy and was taken prisoner by Italy .

After the First World War , Granach returned to the Berlin theaters after an interlude in Munich with Hermine Körner , where he played under Erwin Piscator ( Oops, we live!, 1927) and at the Prussian State Theater under Leopold Jessner and was one of his most popular actors Time belonged.

In 1920 Alexander Granach made his film debut with Die Liebe vom Zigeuner ist… . He appeared in some of the major works of expressionist film , Murnau's Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror (1921), Arthur Robison's Shadow - A Nocturnal Hallucination (1923) and Jessner's Earth Spirit (1923).

In 1929 Granach founded an actor collective, Das Novemberstudio , which in the same year performed two productions in front of the Berlin audience.

In the German sound film he was only able to participate in a few productions like in 1914 - The last days before the world fire , Danton and comradeship . In 1933 he had to emigrate due to his left-wing political attitude and his Jewish origins and after a stopover in Switzerland he went to Warsaw . There he played the title role in Yiddish in the world premiere of Friedrich Wolf's drama Professor Mamlock . He then went on tour with the piece in Poland. In 1935 he received an invitation to the Yiddish Theater in Kiev and moved to the Soviet Union in May. There he starred in two films, Poslednij Tabor - The Last Gypsy Camp and Borzy - Fighter . In the course of the Stalinist purges , Alexander Granach was arrested in Kiev on November 12, 1937. Thanks to the intervention of Lion Feuchtwanger , however, he received a permit to leave Zurich a short time later and was able to leave the Soviet Union on December 16, 1937. At the Schauspielhaus Zürich he had his last appearances in Europe in Macbeth and Danton's death .

In the spring of 1938 he emigrated to the USA , where he first stayed in New York and concentrated on learning the English language before starting a new film career in Hollywood . There he played u. a. in the films Ninotschka at the side of Greta Garbo , Also Henker Die , directed by Fritz Lang , as well as in The Hitler Gang and The Seventh Cross . Like other German emigrants, he often had to play Nazis because of his German accent . From December 1944 he successfully appeared on Broadway in New York in the play A Bell for Adano .

Alexander Granach was married to Martha Guttmann for the first time. With her he had a son, Gerhard (* 1915), who emigrated to Palestine in 1936 and lived as Gad Granach in Jerusalem until his death on January 6, 2011 . The marriage was divorced in 1921. Granach later lived with the actress Lotte Lieven-Stiefel , whom he wanted to see recognized as his legitimate wife, even though they were not married. In 1945, after his death, his autobiography was published by a Swedish publisher in exile under the title Da geht ein Mensch .

Alexander Granach died on March 14, 1945 in New York after an appendix operation of a pulmonary embolism .

Characteristic quotations

  • as a stage actor:
One of the strangest designers was Alexander Granach ... It drove him to Berlin early on, where he was still a craftsman and acted on a jargon stage. He continued his education with the utmost tenacity and began as the youngest of all Shylocks in Munich. At first he put on bright colors. Then in the cool air of Berlin, drastic as it was, he reduced excess to measure. Compact body, with a speaking eye, with a voice rich in metal, but now also disciplined in screaming, he played Franz Moor. He was Goethe's Mephisto, Schiller's Isolani and with bubbling agility he was a Muley Hassan in “Fiesco”, who made a big role out of a small role.
  • as a film actor:
… Noisy outdoorsman… .

Filmography

Fonts

  • There is a person walking. Novel of a life. Ölbaum, Augsburg 2003, (new edition) ISBN 3-927217-38-7 . This autobiography first appeared in 1945 in the Exil-Verlag Neuer Verlag in Stockholm and has been reprinted in many editions since then.
  • You my dear piece of home. Letters to Lotte Lieven from exile . Edited by Angelika Wittlich and Hilde Recher. With a foreword by Mario Adorf and an afterword by Reinhard Müller. Augsburg: Ölbaum, 2008.
  • There Goes an Actor: The Autobiography of a Distinguished Actor's Early Years. Doubleday, Doran, New York, 1945.
  • From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, 2010. (With a new Introduction by Herbert S. Lewis.)

literature

Documentaries

Web links

Commons : Alexander Granach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In addition to 1890, 1893 is also given as the year of birth, including Ulrich Liebe (ed.): Von Adorf bis Ziemann. The Bibliography of Actor Biographies 1900–2000
  2. ↑ Next to March 14th there is also March 13th 1945 as the date of death, for example in CineGraph, filmportal.de and Ulrich Liebe (ed.): Von Adorf bis Ziemann. The bibliography of actor biographies 1900–2000 .
  3. ↑ http://www.berliner-schauspielschule.de/granach.htm
  4. ^ Alain Claude Sulzer in: FAZ November 27, 2008, p. 36
  5. ^ Fritz Engel, in: Siegmund Kaznelson (Ed.), Jews in the German Cultural Area, Berlin 1962, page 214
  6. ↑ Rudolf Arnheim, in: Siegmund Kaznelson (ed.), Jews in the German Cultural Area, Berlin 1962, page 239 f.
personal data
SURNAME Granach, Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gronach, Jessaja (real name); Gronach, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Werbowitz , Horodenka District , Eastern Galicia , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1945
Place of death New York City , USA