Hanna Kohner

Hanna Kohner in This Is Your Life (1953)

Hanna Bloch Kohner (born September 7, 1919 in Ústí nad Labem , Czechoslovakia , as Johanna Adele Bloch ; † February 7, 1990 in Los Angeles ) was a Czech Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the USA . She became known in 1953 through an appearance on the American television program This Is Your Life , during which the full biography of a Holocaust survivor was presented to a wide audience for the first time.

Life

Hanna Kohner was born in 1919 in Aussig as a Czech named Johanna Adele Bloch and grew up in Teplitz-Schönau with their Jewish parents Max and Hertha Bloch.

After the German invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938 she fled to Amsterdam , where she worked as a housemaid working. Her childhood friend and later husband Walter Kohner was able to flee to the USA , which Hanna Bloch was denied until the end of the war due to the quota regulations there . After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 , she married the German refugee Carl Benjamin to prevent a possible deportation. At first it now bore his name. In 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Theresienstadt in 1944 , then to Auschwitz , where her parents were murdered in July and her husband in October. In the same month she herself had to undergo an abortion under adverse circumstances, mediated by her brother Gottfried, who was also in the camp. At the end of 1944, Hanna Bloch Benjamin was taken to Mauthausen , where she spent the time up to the liberation in May 1945 with heavy physical labor .

Immediately after the liberation, through the mediation of an American soldier, she was able to contact Walter Kohner, who was stationed for the US Army in Luxembourg and worked there for the Allies at Radio Luxembourg . In the same year they married, and in 1946 they moved to Los Angeles , where Walter worked as a theater agent from then on.

In 1953 Hanna Kohner's controversially discussed television appearance took place. In 1955, she gave birth to their only daughter, Julie, after suffering eight miscarriages as a result of an abortion in Auschwitz. In 1984 she published the love story together with her husband and with the help of his brother Friedrich Kohner , which contained memoirs and reports from the war.

On February 7, 1990, Hanna Kohner died of a heart attack in Los Angeles .

TV appearance

procedure

The television appearance on This Is Your Life on May 27, 1953 was - v. a. due to the concept of the show - characterized by awkward and emotional rather than deliberate moments. After Hanna Kohner had been pretended by her friends that a friend, the actor Jeffrey Hunter , should be brought on stage, she accompanied him unsuspectingly to the production location of the show, the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood . Shortly after the show began, presenter Ralph Edwards and Hunter opened up the real plan.

The main object of each program was the presentation of the carefully researched biography of the guest by the moderator, supplemented by mostly rhetorical questions to the guest and appearances by people who were important to the guest's life but had fallen out of his field of vision. The half-hour episode with Kohner was planned meticulously and dramatically, so that the highlight of the show was surprisingly the brother Gottfried, who had flown in from Israel . Before, during the presentation of Hanna Kohner's résumé, various important people in her life had appeared: a childhood friend, a fellow inmate from the Nazi camps, a post-war neighbor from Amsterdam, Kohner's husband Walter and the American soldier from Mauthausen.

Various stories and representations were accompanied by music, such as the German invasion with the Horst Wessel song or the liberation of the camp with Beethoven's 5th Symphony . A seriousness built up by the factual descriptions was broken several times by the moderator Edwards hastily continuing his agenda.

The narrative runs through the entire episode that America has given Kohner protection, that it is her dream home and that she also looks like a young American. However, it is not expressly stated that they could no longer reach America before the war simply because of the entry requirements at the time.

The fact that abortion is not mentioned in Auschwitz can partly be attributed to the stringent dramaturgy of the program, but partly also simply to a social taboo of the time.

At the end of the broadcast, the moderator calls for donations for the United Jewish Appeal under the keyword Hanna ; the sponsor has already deposited $ 1,000 .

Research interests

Also because of the group picture towards the end, the show with Hanna Kohner is sometimes seen as a forerunner of later Holocaust interviews.

For Holocaust research, those aspects are particularly relevant that have obvious similarities or differences in dealing with the Holocaust from the 1978 Holocaust series onwards , because This Is Your Life comes from a time when there were hardly any conventions for dealing with this topic. Noticeable are u. a. The following points:

• In his introductory words Edwards speaks of "Hitler's cruel purge of German Jews". Apart from the fact that it was not only German Jews who became victims, the term purge (“cleansing”) had a Stalinist tinge and was mostly only used in connection with Soviet history. This makes it clear that there was still no generally recognized term such as “Holocaust” and “ Shoah ” today .
• The image of showers, which is still used today, as a representation of the extermination camps, already appears in Hanna Kohner's appearance. Regarding the processes involved in admission to the camp, the moderator explains that each inmate was given a bar of soap to use in the shower rooms - uncertain whether water or gas would eventually escape.
• According to Edwards, the main sponsor of the show, Hazel Bishop , waived advertisements during Hanna Kohner's biography because of the topic alone. The question of possible irreverence through commercial breaks became topical again in the 1990s in America and Germany, namely in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List .
• From the 1990s onwards, the Shoah Foundation carried out extensive interviews with Holocaust survivors. Jan Taubitz ( University of Erfurt ) sees similarities between the style of This Is Your Life and the design of the Shoah Foundation's conversations, such as the deliberately homely backdrop, the group picture with relatives and acquaintances at the end, and the declared aim of evoking emotions. He sees these similarities as the nucleus of a “master narrative” developed from the Holocaust series onwards .
• Due to the moderator's less open interview technique, Taubitz and Jeffrey Shandler ( Rutgers University ) disagree as to whether This Is Your Life is an early form (Taubitz) or the opposite (Shandler) of the life history interview technique , the aim of which is to convey Open, chronologically sorted questions to get the most comprehensive picture of a life story possible.

Political background

The show was produced less than a month before the controversial execution of suspected Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg . Jeffrey Shandler suspects that the excellent integration of Jews against anti-communist voices in the population (sometimes viewed as displaced persons ) should be shown (Edwards on Kohner: “loyalty and devotion to the land of your adoption”), and refers in this context to the Jewish producers of the show Axel Gruenberg and Alfred Paschall .

literature

• Kohner, Hanna and Walter with Frederick: Hanna and Walter: A Love Story , New York 1984, ISBN 0-394-52164-1 .
• Kohner, Hanna and Walter with Frederick : Hanna and Walter: a love story , Munich 1986, ISBN 3-426-01254-5 .
• Shandler, Jeffrey: While America watches. Televising the Holocaust , New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-513929-1 .
• Shandler, Jeffrey: This is Your Life: Hanna Bloch-Kohner. The story of an Auschwitz survivor on early American television , in: Fritz Bauer Institute (ed.): Auschwitz. History, reception and impact , Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1996, ISBN 3-593-35441-1 .
• Taubitz, Jan: Holocaust Oral History and the Long End of Contemporary Witnesses , Göttingen 2016, plus Diss. Univ. Erfurt 2014, ISBN 3-8353-1843-8 .

Web links

• Recording of the This Is Your Life broadcast on May 27, 1953 at archive.org
• Hanna Kohner in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Margolick, David : Television and the Holocaust: An Odd Couple ( New York Times, January 31, 1999)
• Mikhail, Bettina: Children of the Shoah Generation: Overcoming Trauma 2.0 ( Spiegel Online )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the IMDb profile of Hanna Bloch Kohner (accessed June 28, 2017).
2. ^ Cf. Kohner, Hanna and Walter with Frederick: Hanna and Walter. A Love Story, New York 1984, p. 147; IMDb profile of Hanna Bloch Kohner.
3. ↑ See note in the DNB catalog (accessed June 1, 2017).
4. ↑ See Taubitz, Jan: Holocaust Oral History and the Long End of Contemporary Witnesses, Göttingen 2016, zugl. Diss. Univ. Erfurt 2014, p. 173.
5. ↑ See Kohner, p. 146.
6. ↑ See Taubitz, p. 174; Mikhail, Bettina: Children of the Shoah Generation. Coping with trauma 2.0 , in: Spiegel Online, 2010 (accessed June 3, 2017); Parks, Louis B .: Stories of Holocaust survival, singing cowboys and more , in: Houston Chronicle, 2012 (accessed June 3, 2017); Novick, Peter: The Holocaust in American Life, Boston / New York 1999, p. 115.
7. ↑ Cf. Asper, Helmut G .: "Something better than death ...": Filmexil in Hollywood, Marburg 2002, p. 227.
8. ↑ See Mikhail.
9. ↑ See Mikhail; Kohner, p. 146.
10. ↑ See Taubitz, pp. 183f .; Mikhail.
11. ↑ See Mikhail; IMDb profile of Hanna Bloch Kohner.
12. ↑ See Shandler, Jeffrey: While America watches. Televising the Holocaust, New York 1999, p. 30; Margolick, David: Television and the Holocaust: An Odd Couple , in: New York Times, January 31, 1999 (accessed June 3, 2017).
13. ↑ See Shandler: America, p. 35; The tearful spectacle, in: DER SPIEGEL 31/1956, p. 38f., Here: 39.
14. ↑ See Shandler: America, pp. 32-34; Taubitz, p. 178; The teardrop spectacle, p. 38.
15. ↑ See Shandler: America, p. 31f.
16. ↑ See Shandler: America, p. 31; Taubitz, pp. 175f .; Margolick.
17. ↑ See Taubitz, pp. 174 and 178; Shandler: America, p. 34; Novick, p. 115.
18. ↑ See Shandler: America, p. 37.
19. ↑ See Taubitz, p. 177.
20. ↑ See Shandler: America, p. 34.
21. ↑ Taubitz (175) suspects pure volatility behind this error.
22. ↑ See Taubitz, p. 175.
23. ↑ See Shandler: America, p. 32; Taubitz, p. 177.
24. ↑ See Shandler: America, p. 36.
25. ↑ Cf. Taubitz, p. 180. Taubitz finds the aim of emotions at the Shoah Foundation in the guidelines for interviewers, which explicitly stipulated time for tears and the like.
26. ↑ See Taubitz, pp. 167 and 184f.
27. ↑ See Taubitz, p. 185; Shandler, Jeffrey: This is Your Life: Hanna Bloch-Kohner. The story of an Auschwitz survivor on early American television, in: Fritz Bauer Institute (ed.): Auschwitz. History, reception and effect, 2nd edition Frankfurt am Main / New York 1997, pp. 371–406, here: 396.
28. ↑ See Shandler: America, p. 37.