Ernest Genval

Ernest Genval (born May 1, 1884 as Ernest Thiers in Liège , Belgium ; † late January / early February 1945 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a Belgian singer , stage actor and filmmaker and a victim of the Holocaust . Genval made a name for himself in what was then the Belgian colony of the Belgian Congo , primarily with his film documentaries made between 1924 and 1938 .

Life

The early years

Genval spent some of his teenage years in Paris shortly after the turn of the century before he had to return home in 1904 to begin his military service. From 1906 he attended the Brussels Conservatory on Rue de la Régence. Genval then went back to Paris to play theater. In the remaining years up to 1914, Genval traveled extensively, performing in countries such as Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Spain, England and the Netherlands. Wounded as a soldier at the beginning of the First World War, Genval was quickly taken out of the fighting force and, at the suggestion of Prime Minister and War Minister Charles de Broqueville, was entrusted with entertainment propaganda tasks. He was supposed to entertain the individual troops near the front with his art of singing and performed several dozen chansons in over 8,000 performances, some of them war songs, some patriotic songs. After the war (1919) Genval published this collection of songs in Belgium under the title "La chanson des Jasses: recueil de chansons et poèmes de guerre dits par l'auteur aux soldats de l'armée belge en campagne: Yser 1916, 1917, 1918" .

Film expeditions to the Belgian Congo

In 1924 Genval went on tour as a singer and musician to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and finally to the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). When he arrived in Congo, the country began to fascinate him from the start. Genval wrote several songs about the Belgian colony, planned a musical and wrote a book. Back home in Belgium (also in 1924), Ernest Genval contacted the filmmaker and cameraman Victor Morin, who introduced him to the subject of film and initially helped to shoot a series of commercials and a full-length film: La Ferme Bécasse . In 1925 the Belgian government sent Genval on a film mission to its largest colony to produce a series of documentaries on site.

The former vaudeville and entertainment singer became over the years a "passionate documentary, industrial and advertising film director". The first large-scale production since Genval's return to the black heart of Africa was called Le Congo qui s'éveille (The Congo Awakens) and was made in 1927. At the end of the same decade, Genval produced more and more propaganda films on behalf of the Belgian Colonial Ministry, which were now increasingly propaganda should celebrate this distant piece of Africa as a “civilizational benefit”. Back home in Brussels, Genval directed a series of short documentary films between 1930 and 1935, some with sound. In 1936 he returned to the Belgian colony and in the next two years devoted himself more and more to the local ethnic groups with his film recordings. The result was called Avec les hommes de l'eau . Now finally at home in Belgium, since 1938 the advertising film Genval's last professional field of activity.

War and persecution

During the German occupation of his country (from 1940) Ernest Genval joined the domestic resistance. He wrote several texts for the banned underground press, which eventually led to his arrest in 1942. First he was put in a Brussels prison (Saint-Gilles). From there Genval was deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then to Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace . When Allied troops approached Strasbourg at the end of 1944, the Germans transferred Genval to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died of typhoid fever in the middle of winter 1945 .

Filmography (small selection of mostly short films)

• 1924: La ferme Becasse (full-length documentary)
• 1925: Manucongo
• 1925: Ferminière en Nioki
• 1925: Arsène Lapin au pays de Liège
• 1926: La Socca
• 1926: De haven van Matadi
• 1926: La Combelga
• 1926: De Boma à Tshela par la voie du Mayumbe
• 1927: Le Congo qui s'éveille (full-length documentary)
• 1926–1928: De Stanleyville à Bukama par la voie des Grands Lacs
• 1928: La fonico
• 1928: La chambre de commerce de Lépoldville
• 1928: De brouwerijen van Katanga
• 1928: Compagnie des chemins de fer du Congo
• 1929: België's Beschavingswerk in Congo
• 1930: trolleybus
• 1930: Congo, het hart van Afrika
• 1931: The Belgian trek couple
• 1932: Grand prix des 24 heures du RACB 1932
• 1933: Ronse
• 1933: Residence Palace
• 1933: Images de Liège
• 1935: Le Diamant
• 1936–1938: Avec les hommes de l'eau

literature

• Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 390

Web links

• detailed biography of Genval on kaowarsom.be
• Genval's biography on congoinharlem.org
• Ernest Genval on ushmm.org
• Ernest Genval in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Between the stage and the barracks . P. 390