Jenny Schaffer-Bernstein

Jenny Schaffer-Bernstein (* July 27, 1888 as Eugenie Schaffer in Vienna , † spring 1943 in Auschwitz-Birkenau ) was an Austrian actress on German theaters.

Live and act

Born Eugenie "Jenny" Schaffer had learned a scene by heart and played it to the director of the Berlin theater , which was a guest in her hometown of Vienna , in the hope of being "discovered". Jenny Schaffer was then taken to Berlin as a volunteer , where she was to receive professional training from Ludwig Hartau . Two months later, Max Reinhardt brought her to live with her and put the actress Tilla Durieux at her side as a teacher.

Jenny Schaffer began her official stage career in February 1911 at the German Theater , directed by Reinhardt, with small and medium-sized roles: she played an elf in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream , Wendla Bergmann in Wedekind's Spring Awakening and a nymph in Goethe's Faust . Half a year later, she moved to the newly founded 'Neue Theater' in Frankfurt am Main , where she stayed for two seasons. It was there that Jenny Schaffer met her fellow actor Otto Bernstein , whom she was to marry later.

In August 1913, the artist moved to the Royal Court Theater in Dresden and worked there for the entire duration of the First World War . In 1919 Jenny Schaffer-Bernstein accepted an offer at the Dresden Schauspielhaus , where she stayed until 1933. In these almost one and a half decades she appeared alongside such renowned colleagues as Erich Ponto , Adolf Wohlbrück , Martin Hellberg and Ernst Josef Aufricht , who later headed Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm .

The takeover of power by the National Socialists suddenly ended the twenty-year career of the Jewish actress in the metropolis on the Elbe. Jenny-Schaffer-Bernstein, like her husband, was excluded from gaming and then returned to Berlin. There, on October 1, 1933, she joined the newly founded Jewish Cultural Association and made her debut as Sittah in Lessing's Nathan the Wise . In the next eight years she made other appearances in: Arthur Schnitzler's Im Spiel der Sommerlüfte , in Bruno Frank's Sturm im Wasserglas (as Lisa), as Candida (in George Bernard Shaw 's play of the same name), in Hebbel's Judith , in Sophocles ' Antigone , in Ferenc Molnár's Great Love and Delilah , in Henrik Ibsen's Supports of Society and Ghosts , in William Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale , in Molière's The Imaginary Sick and in Carlo Goldoni's Mirandolina . The artist gave her last appearance in June 1941 in the play Señor Alan from Purgatory .

After the last cultural institution open to Jews in the German Reich was closed in September 1941, Jenny Schaffer-Bernstein , who had been released from the Reich Theater Chamber in 1934, was forced to work as a worker and assigned to the Osram lightbulb group. When the great wave of deportations in the spring of 1943 also took hold of the last Jews remaining in Berlin, the Bernstein couple were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and gassed there shortly after their arrival .

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. 304.
• Hannes Heer ; Sven Fritz; Heike Brummer; Jutta Zwilling: Silent voices: the expulsion of the "Jews" and "politically intolerable" from the Hessian theaters 1933 to 1945 . Berlin: Metropol, 2011 ISBN 978-3-86331-013-4 , pp. 363f.

Web links

• http://www.juden-in-mittelachsen.de/shalom/jenny_schaffer_bernstein.html