James Iwan Wolf

James Iwan Wolf (born James Iwan Isaac on April 14, 1893 in Hamburg , German Empire ; died on June 6, 1981 in San Diego , California , United States ) was a Hamburg folk singer and variety entertainer .

Life

The son of the Hamburg folk singer Leopold Wolf (born on June 6, 1869 in Hamburg, died on June 16, 1926 there) received training as a typewriter mechanic. After his work in this profession and his service in the First World War, which he spent temporarily in French captivity, James Iwan Wolf switched to musical entertainment when his father died in 1926 and continued the work of the Wolf duo with his uncle Ludwig Wolf . His uncle James Wolf had left the Wolf trio back in 1906. The seizure of power by the National Socialists made the artistic work of the two Jewish vocal entertainers more difficult, and ultimately they were banned from performing. As a result of the Reichskristallnacht in November 1938, James Wolf was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for a month . After this period of imprisonment he planned to flee Hitler's Germany with his younger brother Donat Wolf (born November 30, 1902 in Hamburg, died July 31, 1984 in Merano).

James Iwan and Donat Wolf boarded a ship for Bangkok on July 26, 1939 and arrived in Shanghai on September 20, 1939. There both Wolfs continued their artistic work as entertainers in the “Artist Club” under the signature of “Gebrüder Wolf”. In addition, James, whose wife had traveled there with their daughter Marion, built on his learned profession and opened a small shop for typewriter repairs. In 1947 James Iwan and Donat Wolf left China, which was threatened by Mao's Red Chinese troops. James Iwan Wolf first traveled to Sweden, where he met his children Peter and Hannelore again in Stockholm. Eventually they all went on to the United States. Wolf worked again as a typewriter mechanic in New York and performed with Donat in the “Café Rheinland” in Manhattan and in the “Schwabenhalle” in Brooklyn under the signature of the Wolf brothers. James Iwan Wolf last lived in San Diego, where he died in June 1981. Brother Donat also moved to California, but settled in San Francisco.

Web links

• James Iwan Wolf on lexm.uni-hamburg.de

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 , pp. 420 f.
• Deutsches Theater-Lexikon, Biographisches und Bibliographisches Handbuch , seventh volume, Berlin / Boston 2012, p. 3536