Hans José Rehfisch

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Hans José Rehfisch (born April 10, 1891 in Berlin ; † June 9, 1960 in Scuol ) was a German playwright , writer and theater manager . He also wrote under the pseudonyms Georg Turner , René Kestner , Sydney Phillips and HG Tennyson Holmes .

Life

Hans José Rehfisch studied economics, philosophy, law and political science in Berlin, Grenoble and Würzburg. In 1916 he was at the University of Wuerzburg on the legal nature of expropriation for Dr. jur. PhD. He then worked in Berlin as a court assessor at the public prosecutor's office and at the criminal chamber at Regional Court II . Later he worked as a lawyer and counsel involved a film company.

His first play appeared in 1913 with the tragedy The Golden Arms . After the end of the First World War , Rehfisch first published further tragedies. In 1922, The Upbringing by 'Kolibri' was his first comedy and in 1924 he celebrated his tragic comedy Who is crying for Juckenack? a Europe-wide success.

Rehfisch gave up his legal practice and from then on devoted himself entirely to the theater. In the Weimar Republic he was one of the much-played dramatists. His socially critical satires and time-related historical dramas were valued for their pointed dialogues. His greatest success was Die Affäre Dreyfus , a play that he had written with Wilhelm Herzog . It premiered in 1929 under the pseudonym René Kestner at the Volksbühne in Berlin and was to be performed in Paris in 1931. The Action Francaise , however, organized riots, so that the play was canceled after a performance. He also wrote the book The Dreyfus Affair with Herzog .

From 1922 to 1923 he and Erwin Piscator directed the Central Theater on Alte Jakobstrasse ( Berlin-Kreuzberg ). From 1931 to 1933 he was President of the Association of German Stage Writers and Stage Composers , a function which he held again from 1951 to 1954 (together with Eduard Künneke ).

As early as 1932 his name appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter in a list of “undesirable” writers. Because of his literary work and his Jewish origins, he was imprisoned in 1933 after the National Socialist " seizure of power ". Then Hans José Rehfisch fled Nazi Germany . First he emigrated to Vienna , where he took over the vacant comedy on Johannesgasse as artistic director together with the Berlin theater entrepreneur Kurt Geldwert (pseudonym: Conrad Dwerthon ). However, due to a lack of capital, the company had to be discontinued after just a few productions. With the support of the publisher Georg Marton (1899–1979), Rehfisch found access to the Viennese theater business, and several successful productions of his plays took place on Viennese stages. The play Water for Canitoga ' (1936), which was created in collaboration with the brothers Egon Eis (1910–1994) and Otto Eis (1903–1952), even ran in 56 cities in Europe and South America. For many of his pieces, Rehfisch chose imaginative pseudonyms. Nevertheless, Viennese theater critics and the Austrian cultural bureaucracy recognized the true identity of the author. Since Rehfisch's Viennese productions were considered harmless entertainment pieces and were also box-office hits, he was not bothered by Austrofascism .

In 1936 Rehfisch went to London . There he hired himself a. a. as a metal worker. In 1939 he was expatriated from the Third Reich . Together with the philosopher Hermann Friedmann , the publicist Hans Jaeger (1899–1975) and the former artistic director of the Dresden theater Karl Wollf (1876–1952), he founded the Club 1943 in London , a cultural association of German-speaking emigrants. In 1944 Rehfisch published the anthology In Tyrannos , which presented the German freedom and resistance movements from four centuries and Germany's democratic tradition. After the Second World War he taught from 1947 to 1949 as a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York City .

In 1950 Rehfisch returned to Germany and lived in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. In 1951 Rehfisch wrote the German version of the screenplay for the film Bluebeard , a Franco-German co-production with Hans Albers in the lead role of the German version. At the beginning of February 1951 the Deutsches Schauspielhaus showed a new version of Rehfisch's comedy Who weeps for Juckenack? and in the same year his historical novel The Witches of Paris was published , which thematized the witchcraft madness and intrigue at the court of Louis XIV . This novel was Rehfisch's greatest success within his old work: By 1969, two editions of Die Hexen von Paris were published by Cotta-Verlag in Stuttgart and seven by Rütten & Loening , published in 1952 in Danish and Dutch, 1954 in Swedish, 1963 in Belgian-Dutch and was published in Slovenian translation in 1970.

Rehfisch appeared on stages in both German states with critical time pieces until the end of the 1950s. His greatest post-war success was the 1955/1956 returnees tragedy Colonel Chabert - originally a story by the French writer Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) from the post-Napoleonic restoration period. Rehfisch also wrote radio plays. For a time he was chairman of the Society for the Exploitation of Literary Copyrights (GELU) formed in 1955 , the forerunner of the Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort .

tomb

Hans José Rehfisch died on June 9, 1960 during a stay in a sanatorium in Switzerland. His grave is located in the cemetery of the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder communities in Berlin. It is dedicated to the city of Berlin as an honorary grave .

Works

Spectacles

  • The Golden Arms - Tragedy (1913)
  • Paradise - A Tragedy (1919)
  • The Chauffeur Martin - A Tragedy in 5 Acts (1920)
  • Deucalion - A Mythical Drama (1921)
  • Upbringing through "Kolibri" - Comedy in 3 acts (1922)
  • Who weeps for itchiness? - tragic comedy in 3 acts (1924)
  • Nickel and the Thirty-Six Righteous - Comedy in 3 Acts (1925)
  • Duel am Lido - Comedy in 3 acts (1926)
  • You can talk about it - Berlin picture sheets in 3 acts (1926)
  • Razzia - A Berlin tragic comedy in 9 pictures (1927)
  • The gynecologist - play in 3 acts (1928)
  • Pietro Aretino - Play in 3 acts (1929)
  • The Dreyfus Affair - Play in 5 Acts (1929) (together with Wilhelm Herzog )
  • Brest-Litovsk - The Drama of European Peace (1930)
  • The Treason of Captain Grisel - Play in 3 Acts (1932)
  • Doctor Semmelweis - Acting (1934)
  • Gentlemen - Drama (1935)
  • The ridiculous Sir Anthony - drama (1935)
  • Water for Canitoga - Play in 3 Acts (1936)
  • First Love - Comedy (1937)
  • Battle for the Leaf - Drama (1937)
  • College Boys - drama (1937)
  • The Iron Road - Drama (1938)
  • Brides at Sea - Drama (1943)
  • Well of Promise - drama (1945)
  • Hands off Helena! - Drama (1951)
  • The Iron Road - Play (1952)
  • From Journey Back - Drama (1952)
  • The Eternal Feminine - Play (1953)
  • The Statutory Health Insurance Physician - Drama (1954)
  • Colonel Chabert - Play in 3 Acts (1955)
  • Doctor Helbig criminal case (1955)
  • Beyond Fear - Play in 3 Acts (1958)
  • Boomerang Drama (1960)
  • Treason in Rome - Drama in 3 Acts (1960)

Books

  • In Tyrannos - Four centuries of struggle against tyranny in Germany. A symposium. (Ed. By Hans Rehfisch, 1944)
  • The Witches of Paris - Novel (1957)
  • Lysistrata's Wedding - Novel (1959)

Archival material

The literary archive of the Akademie der Künste (Berlin) has an extensive inventory of manuscripts, letters, diary entries and other documents by Hans José Rehfisch.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ DNB , German National Bibliography
personal data
SURNAME Roe deer, Hans José
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German playwright
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1960
Place of death Scuol