Camilla Spira

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Camilla Spira on January 1st, 1927
in the Berliner Morgenpost
(photographer: John Graudenz )
Camilla Spira in Westerbork in a picture by Leo Kok .

Camilla Spira (born March 1, 1906 in Hamburg , † August 25, 1997 in Berlin ) was a German actress . She starred in both silent and sound films and on stage . Camilla Spira was the daughter of the actress Lotte Spira and the actor Fritz Spira , who was one of the pioneers of the German silent film. She was the sister of DEFA actress Steffie Spira .

Life

Gravestone of Camilla Spira

Camilla Spira attended the Lyceum and then the drama school founded by Max Reinhardt at the German Theater in Berlin. She began her stage career in 1922 at the Wallner Theater and at the German Art Theater in Berlin. Then she had an engagement in Vienna at the Theater in der Josefstadt and returned to Berlin, where she made her film debut in the silent film Mother and Son in 1924 . Other silent films and theater appearances followed. From 1925 to 1927 she appeared at the Deutsches Theater . She then worked on the Barnowsky Theaters until 1930 . Her greatest stage success was in 1930 in the Singspiel Im Weisse Rößl . In 1933 she appeared at the Volksbühne . Since she had a good voice, the switch from silent to sound film had a rather beneficial effect on her career. She was cast mostly in the role of squeaky clean, always good-humored German girls - for example in the movie Dawn , an epic on the German submariners that shortly before the 1933 seizure of the Nazi regime was released.

Defamed as " half-Jewish " by the Nazi regime , she received no further film offers from the mid- 1930s . It did more badly than right in the Jüdischer Kulturbund in front of an exclusively Jewish audience in Berlin. After the Olympic Games in 1936 , conditions for Jews deteriorated. She managed to emigrate to Amsterdam in 1938 with her husband, the lawyer and deputy general director of the Engelhardt brewery Hermann Eisner , and their two children , where she was later captured by German occupiers and sent to the Westerbork transit camp in 1943 . In Westerbork, Spira appeared in a cabaret program organized by Max Ehrlich , which was intended to distract the prisoners who stayed behind if transports to Auschwitz had taken place the day before . In addition to Ehrlich, she stood on the Westerbork camp stage with Willy Rosen, among others, and met a grateful audience with her well-known songs.

Soon Spira and her family were about to be transported to Auschwitz themselves. In order to avoid deportation, she turned to Hans Georg Calmeyer , who headed a department in the German occupation authorities in The Hague to clarify doubtful cases of ancestry. Obviously the then SS-Oberführer Walter Schellenberg , head of the foreign intelligence service in the Reich Security Main Office , who was repeatedly in the Netherlands for secret service operations, advised her to speak to Calmeyer. In any case, Spira explicitly referred to Schellenberg as a whistleblower in two letters to Calmeyer. The actress wrote that she was actually not half-Jewish, but "full Aryan". She was born out of wedlock. Her mother, Lotte Spira , had cheated on her “Aryan” Hungarian colleague Victor Palfy. “My mother admitted this to me as early as 1933, when the Jewish question became acute and I was therefore forced to give up my career as an actress in Berlin.” Nevertheless, she prevented “my mother from doing anything to correct my origins, because I did have been with Dr. Hermann Eisner, who is now working here for the Jewish Council, married and understandably had reservations about admitting my illegitimate birth to him ”. Calmeyer then initially issued a provisional certificate of parentage so that Spira could at least initially leave the Westerbork camp. He then had his mother questioned via the Gestapo in Berlin, who confirmed her alleged affair with the dazzling-looking Hungarian colleague - several "suitable" photographs were attached to the application. In an anthropological report, Hans Weinert , appointed by Calmeyer as an expert, finally came to the conclusion that Spira saw her alleged illegitimate father more like her than her documentary father. And so Camilla Spira was finally declared a “full Aryan”. Her marriage to Hermann Eisner was now a “privileged mixed marriage ”, so that, in addition to herself, her Jewish husband and children were also protected from deportation. The family lived in Amsterdam until the end of the war.

Attempts like that of Camilla Spira to avoid deportation by “correcting” one's own ancestry history were quite common at the time and Calmeyer supported them consciously and in many cases. Yad Vashem therefore declared him a " Righteous Among the Nations ".

In 1947 Camilla Spira returned to Berlin. She settled in West Berlin , got engagements at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm and the Hebbel Theater , but also got some roles at the East German DEFA . Her film Die Buntkarierte from 1949 is one of DEFA's classics today. When she was advised to move to the eastern part if she wanted to expect further engagements, she refused, unlike her sister Steffie Spira, this request. She had numerous engagements at West Berlin theaters and also acted in some well-known films from the 1950s , such as The Devil's General , Sky Without Stars and Roses for the Public Prosecutor .

Camilla Spira was buried at her husband's side not far from her apartment in the Dahlem forest cemetery in Berlin.

Honors

Filmography (selection)

Radio plays

  • 1927: Rudolf Bernauer , Rudolph Schanzer: As once in May. Big Berlin posse with singing in four pictures (Otille von Henkeshoven) - Director: Rudolf Bernauer ( Funk-Hour AG , Berlin)
  • 1948: George Bernard Shaw : The Emperor of America - Director: Alfred Braun ( Berliner Rundfunk )
  • 1965: Max Kretzer : The millionaire farmer. Back then it was - Stories from old Berlin (Berta Köppke) (Story No. 5 in 15 episodes) - Director: Ivo Veit ( RIAS Berlin)

literature

  • Kay Less : 'In life, more is taken from you than given ...'. Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. P. 475 f., ACABUS-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Wachter: Biography ( memento from February 10, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) defa-stern hours.de.
  2. ↑ a b c d Birgit Ahrens: Because the stage is the mirror of time: Emil Orlik (1870–1932) and the theater. Verlag Ludwig, Kiel 2001, ISBN 978-3-933598-19-6 , p. 354.
  3. ↑ Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture . tape 6 : Te-Z. Springer-Verlag, 2017, ISBN 978-3-476-01221-0 , pp. 382 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  4. ^ Camilla Spira holocaustmusic.ort.org, accessed November 20, 2012.
  5. ↑ Mathias Middelberg: "Who am I that I decide about life and death?" Hans Calmeyer - "Racial advisor" in the Netherlands 1941–1945 . Wallstein, Göttingen, ISBN 978-3-8353-1528-0 , pp. 102 .
  6. ↑ Calmeyer's List: How a "Racial Officer" saved thousands of Jews from the concentration camp. tagesspiegel.de, accessed on October 26, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Mathias Middelberg: “Who am I that I decide about life and death?” Hans Calmeyer - “Race advisor” in the Netherlands 1941–1945 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1528-0 , pp. 102 f .
  8. ↑ Mathias Middelberg: "Who am I that I decide about life and death?" Hans Calmeyer - "Racial advisor" in the Netherlands 1941–1945 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1528-0 , pp. 113 .
  9. ↑ berlin.friedparks.de: Waldfriedhof Dahlem, Camilla Spira Memorial , accessed on November 20, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Spira, Camilla
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actress
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1997
Place of death Berlin