Heinrich George

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portrait photo of Heinrich Georges by Hugo Erfurth (1930)

Heinrich George (born  October 9, 1893 in Stettin ; † September 25, 1946 in the Sachsenhausen special camp , Oranienburg ; born Georg August Friedrich Hermann Schulz, official name change to his stage name Heinrich George in October 1932 ) was a German actor . He is the father of the actor Götz George .

Life

Origin, education and first years

Georg Schulz, who later became Heinrich George, was the second son of the couple August Friedrich Schulz, at that time "Magistrats Bureau Assistant" and former deck officer , and Anna Auguste Wilhelmine, née Glander. He left the upper secondary school in Berlin before graduating from high school and took acting lessons in Stettin. In the summer of 1912 he made his debut in Kolberg as head waiter in the operetta Die chaste Susanne by Jean Gilbert . After further stages in Bromberg and Neustrelitz , he took part in the First World War as a volunteer and was seriously wounded in the winter of 1915.

Weimar Republic

After returning from the war, he worked in Dresden at the Albert Theater (1917/18), Frankfurt am Main at the Schauspielhaus (1918–1921) and in 1921 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In 1921 he shot his first film with the director Ludwig Berger . In the following years he became one of the most renowned actors of the Weimar Republic . He became a member of the VDSt Greifswald and was involved in the Communist Party of Germany . He played under Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht . From the mid-1920s he also appeared in popular roles as a film actor. In 1923 he founded with actors Elisabeth Bergner and Alexander Cranach the actors' theater to be able to work independently as an artist. From 1925 to 1929 he played mainly at the Volksbühne . In 1926 he played the foreman of the heart machine in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis . From 1926 to 1938 he appeared regularly at the Heidelberg Festival . In 1929 George organized a historical commemoration ceremony for his friend and colleague Albert Steinrück in the Staatstheater am Gendarmenmarkt , in which almost all well-known Berlin actors of the time, some in the smallest roles, took part. The aim of the event was to secure a livelihood for Steinrück's descendants by selling Steinrück's paintings that were exhibited in the theater.

Heinrich George in front of his house on Wannsee , 1930s
At the 1939 press ball, George (right) was delighted with the winner of a KdF car in the presence of Bengt Berg (3rd from right) and Ferdinand Porsche (5th from left)
Heinrich George (center) during a guest performance in occupied France with Robert Ley and Gisela Uhlen (1941)

From January 1930 he was director of the State Theater on Gendarmenmarkt. For his staging of Götz von Berlichingen as "Urgötz" - with himself in the leading role - in October 1930 he was looking for an Adelheid von Walldorf. Ernst Legal , with whom Berta Drews (1901–1987) had worked on the Adelheid at the Reinhardt School in Berlin, introduced George to the young actress who hired her for this production. The day after the premiere, George invited "Kleene", as he called her, to a premiere party and they got to know each other better as a result.

In 1931 the George-Drews had their first son Jan (who lives in Berlin and works as a photographer). With effect from October 12, 1932, Georg Schulz was granted the official name change to his stage name Heinrich George, with whom he had previously made a career as an actor. The two married in 1933, and their second son Götz , who also became an actor, was born in 1938 .

"Third Reich"

After Hitler came to power in early 1933, Heinrich George was initially excluded from gaming, but came to terms with the Nazi regime and took an active role in Nazi film and radio propaganda until 1945 . He played in various UFA films, including the Nazi propaganda films Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) and Kolberg (1945) and the anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß (1940). In 1937 he became director of the Schiller Theater in the Reich capital Berlin and also signed artists who were "undesirable" to the Nazi regime, including the art historian Wilhelm Fraenger (released as a communist in Heidelberg in 1933), the Catholic actor Robert Müller (according to the dismissed as a Jew by National Socialist racial laws ), the graphic artist Karl Rössing (communist) and his pupil Günther Strupp . After fire bombs had badly damaged the Schiller Theater in September 1943, Goebbels presented him with the Cross of Merit 2nd Class - “for fire-fighting work on the night of the fire”.

Arrests and internment

On May 14, 1945, according to Berta Drews, George was arrested for the first time by Soviet officers with the words "He will not stay long" and released the next day. He was given meat and wine for the family. A week later, he was detained again for one day, and for the third time for five days from May 26th. He is said to have told his interrogators "Please shoot me", his wife reported in her memoirs (1956/1986) that he had said:

“They should take everything I have from me, starve and humiliate me. But if they forbid me to play, I will die. "

On May 31st, George received a certificate from the mayor of Charlottenburg stating that he was not allowed to be used for clean-up work, "since he has to be available to the authorities for questioning at any time". At the beginning of June, the Soviet city commandant Nikolai Bersarin issued him a so-called “letter of protection”, which appeared in the KGB files as a “pass” confiscated during the last arrest. Shortly afterwards, two foreign Germans are said to have tampered with the devastated and looted villa, a day later two more came who, despite his favorable certificates for him, took George away with the words "Bersarin is dead!"

The chronologically ordered file begins with an undated report by five informers, three of them with legible signatures. The letter cites: “14 days before the Red Army freed us from the Nazi yoke, he made himself available to the NSDAP and tried to incite the Berliners into active resistance in the form of an appeal in the Berlin press. The entire German people can stand as a witness against George. If you put George on any German stage, we think he would be lynched. ”Another anonymous denunciation refers to the actor Bob Iller , who can testify that George was aware of his role.

Six weeks after his arrest and three weeks after the interrogation, Lieutenant Bibler retrospectively ordered the arrest on July 28, 1945. It contains the almost literal takeover of the first denunciation, Bibler reports to his boss, Pyrin, that the prisoner is "one of the most respected fascist artists" who "contributed to the continuation of the war through his pro-fascist agitation on the radio and in newspapers [...] ". The day before, Bibler's Soviet colleague, citing NKVD order No. 0016 of January 11, 1945, had ordered George's transfer to the NKVD special camp in Hohenschönhausen . There he managed to set up a prisoner theater with the Urfaust as a program. His wife was allowed to speak to him at the gate for five minutes once a week and also to bring him textbooks and sheet music. On December 6th he was allowed to hug his son Götz, it was the last time Berta saw him. In February 1946 a smuggled cashier got out of the camp, according to which the communist writer Friedrich Wolf (the father of the later Stasi HVA head Markus Wolf ) wanted to help George get released, provided that he was “on the barricade for us " got to.

This never happened, George was transferred to the Soviet special camp No. 7 Sachsenhausen . Attempts by the Berlin theater people to get him free from the culture officers of the Soviet Army were unsuccessful and the officers remained silent. According to a fellow inmate, George continued to play in Sachsenhausen in front of 12,000 inmates and the Russian guards.

Sickness and death

The once massive man lost weight rapidly - the February 1946 receipt documented a weight loss of 80  pounds (40 kilograms) - and was completely exhausted in the meantime. On September 22nd, during preliminary rehearsals for a dramatization of the ballad Death of Tiberius , George went to the internal medicine clinic, according to a fellow inmate. The examining doctor found appendicitis. The next morning the paramedics took him to the hospital on a stretcher. As a result of the appendectomy, George died on September 25, 1946. The death certificate signed by the Soviet and German doctors shows the diagnosis “ laparotomy ( appendicitis ), bronchopneumonia , cardiac atrophy ”. The cause of death is given as "bronchopneumonia and cardiac insufficiency".

The grave of Heinrich George in the Zehlendorf cemetery with a bust of Hans Gerdes

There are two similar versions of the further course and the place of burial:

  • According to Spiegel (1995), referring to the KGB files, it was a “Jewish theater fan among the Soviet staff” who managed to get the camp commandant to have George's body “in a coffin in front of the fence in the Oranienburg Forest , between the graves Russian officers ”instead of being buried in the usual mass grave.
  • In the S2 -Spielzeit telecast Beauty and the Devil. Heinrich Georges Liaison with the Nazis , first broadcast on November 19, 1996, it was requests from fellow inmates and above all a Russian camp doctor "who valued his [Georges] art" and made sure that George was in an individual grave in front of the camp gate was buried.

In 1994, according to a former inmate, the bones were found in an overgrown forest near Sachsenhausen - the former prison cemetery of the special camp -, identified by means of a DNA comparison with the two George sons and transferred to Berlin.

George's remains were buried in the Zehlendorf cemetery. A pedestal with a bronze bust of George, a work by the Stuttgart sculptor Hans Gerdes, serves as the gravestone . An inscription commemorates George's wife Berta Drews , who was buried at sea in 1987 . By decision of the Berlin Senate , George's last resting place has been listed as the grave of honor of the State of Berlin since 1995 . The dedication was extended in 2018 by the usual period of twenty years.

Quotes

"From the Soviet interrogation protocol of inmate Heinrich George" from the interrogation on July 10, 1945 in German translation, filed in KGB file no. 13 328:

“Until 1933 I took part in the actions of the communist party and had closer ties to writers from the communist camp, including Bertolt Brecht, Johannes Becher, Ernst Toller and others. Back then I was playing in democratic films, I was one of the most famous actors back then.
Hitler came to power in 1933. I was questioned and lost my job. I had the choice of either giving up my career and possibly going to prison or somehow coming to terms with the fascist regime. "

- Heinrich George : Quoted in Der Spiegel , 1995

Georges Sohn Götz, in 1995 in Spiegel summarizing the research of the editorial team:

"He really paid."

Filmography

Radio plays

Films about Heinrich George

literature

  • Membership directory of the Kameradschaft der Deutschen Künstler e. V. Comradeship of German Artists V., Berlin W 35, Viktoriastr. 3–4, 1937 (also: ibid 1940).
  • Berta Drews : Heinrich George. An acting life. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1956.
  • Klaus Riemer:  George, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 234 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Horst Mesalla : Heinrich George. Reconstruction of the acting performance with special consideration of contemporary journalism. Berlin 1969 (Berlin, Free University, dissertation, 14 February 1968).
  • Berta Drews: Where on the way. Memories. Langen Müller, Munich a. a. 1986, ISBN 3-7844-2098-2 .
  • Michael Klonovsky , Jan von Flocken : Stalin's Camp in Germany 1945–1950. Documentation, witness reports. Ullstein, Berlin a. a. 1991, ISBN 3-550-07488-3 .
  • Peter Laregh: Heinrich George. Comedian of his time. With numerous documents and directories of his theater and film roles. Langen Müller, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-7844-2363-9 .
  • Contemporary history: "Play or die" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1995, pp. 236-245 ( online ).
  • Werner Maser : Heinrich George. Man made of earth. The political biography. With documents. Edition q, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-86124-351-2 .
  • Kurt Fricke : Playing on the Abyss. Heinrich George. A political biography. mdv - Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 2000, ISBN 3-89812-021-X (also: Halle, University, dissertation, 1999).
  • Kurt Fricke: Heinrich George. In: Bernd Heidenreich, Sönke Neitzel (Ed.): Media in National Socialism. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-76710-3 , pp. 83-107.
  • Berta Drews: My husband Heinrich George. Langen Mueller Herbig, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-7844-8164-7 . (With a foreword by Götz George and an afterword by Jan George.) In the chapters “Die Kleene hat was!” And “Endzeit” based on the memoirs of Berta Drews, Wohin auf Weg , first published in 1986 (see above).

Web links

Commons : Heinrich George  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d "Order of the Prussian Minister of Justice of October 12, 1932 III d 1914/32". In: "Copy [...] of the [...] certified copy of the marginal note from the main register [...] Szczecin, 5th November 1934." ( Facsimile szczecin.ap.gov.pl - official website of the city of Szczecin ; accessed on 2nd April 2016.)
  2. ↑ Berta Drews: My husband Heinrich George. Chapter "Kleene has something!" Berlin entrance - fateful first meeting with Heinrich George. Munich 1986/2006, without page numbers ( limited preview in Google book search).
  3. ↑ The pact with the devil. Heinrich Georges liaison with the Nazis. (PDF) SWR2, p. 6.
  4. ↑ Order of the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 00315 of April 18, 1945 "On the partial amendment of the order of the NKVD of the USSR 0016 of January 11, 1945" (PDF) Website of the Saxon Memorials Foundation; accessed on September 10, 2018
  5. ↑ Interned German website of the Saxon Memorials Foundation, accessed on September 10, 2018
  6. ↑ The pact with the devil. Heinrich Georges liaison with the Nazis. (PDF) SWR2, p. 8.
  7. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 673.
  8. ^ Hans Helmut Prinzler : November days . hhprinzler.de, November 3, 1995; accessed on March 17, 2019.
  9. ↑ Honorary graves of the State of Berlin (as of November 2018) . (PDF, 413 kB) Senate Department for the Environment, Transport and Climate Protection, p. 25; accessed on March 17, 2019. Recognition and further preservation of graves as honorary graves of the State of Berlin . (PDF, 369 kB). Berlin House of Representatives, printed matter 18/14895 of November 21, 2018, p. 1 and Annex 2, p. 4; accessed on March 17, 2019.
  10. ↑ "Arrange somehow". From the Soviet interrogation protocol of inmate Heinrich George . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1995, pp. 237 ( online box).
  11. ↑ Heinrich George in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  12. ↑ Heinrich George in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  13. ↑ George in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  14. ↑ Subtitle: “One of the greatest German actors died in the Soviet detention camp in 1946 - Heinrich George, once a leftist, then a compliant tool of Nazi propaganda. The files of the Soviet secret police NKVD on George's arrest, interrogation and death have been preserved. SPIEGEL has seen it - a document of a German fate. "
personal data
SURNAME George, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schulz, Georg August Friedrich Hermann (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1946
Place of death Sachsenhausen special warehouse , Oranienburg