Julius Gellner

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Julius Gellner (born April 25, 1899 in Saaz , Austria-Hungary ; died October 24, 1983 in London ) was one of the best-known German-speaking directors of the 1920s. From 1924 to 1933 he was senior director and deputy director of the Münchner Kammerspiele in the Schauspielhaus. He is the uncle of the philosopher and social scientist Ernest Gellner .

Life

Julius Gellner was the ninth child of Anna (née Löbl) and Max Gellner. The family later moved to Prague , where Julius Gellner trained as a bank clerk. During this time, Gellner followed his strong theatrical inclinations as a member of an amateur theater group.

When he had collected enough savings to venture into the theater world, he went to Würzburg in 1918 . After initial difficulties, he managed to get an engagement as an actor and to prove himself on stage. Further stations on his way as an actor included a. Berlin and Düsseldorf . In Düsseldorf he was discovered by the director of the Münchner Kammerspiele, Otto Falckenberg , and brought to Munich in 1921 .

During Gellner's first years as an actor at the Kammerspiele, Falckenberg became aware of his ability to be a director. In 1923 Gellner had his first production with Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening . Further productions followed, and in 1924 Gellner was appointed senior director and deputy director of the Kammerspiele at a young age.

He staged a. a. the following pieces at the Kammerspiele:

Dorothea Angermann by Gerhart Hauptmann (1926), Disease of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner (1927), Traumstück by Karl Kraus (1928), Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (1928), Kleine Komödie by Siegfried Geyer (1929), just published by Edouard Bourdet (1929), Revolt in Martin Lampel's education center (1929), The marriage of Alfred Döblin (1930), Napoleon intervenes by Walter Hasenclever (1930), A line goes through the room of Valentin Katajew (1931), The captain of Köpenick by Carl Zuckmayer (1931), Der böse Geist Lumpacivagabundus by Johann Nestroy (1931), Elisabeth of England by Ferdinand Bruckner (1932), Charley's aunt by Brandon Thomas (1933), The Swedish Matchstick by Ludwig Hirschfeld (1933).

In 1925 he married the actress Maria Byk (real name: Annemarie Albertine Böck; after her second marriage to Marian, then Albertine Haschkowetz). Their daughter Johanna (later: Joan) Gellner was born on February 26, 1926. However, the marriage lasted only two years. Maria Byk remarried in 1936 to her acting colleague Ferdinand Marian , who would later play the leading role in the Nazi propaganda film Jud Suss .

At the time of National Socialism

In March 1933, during a Sunday soccer game, Gellner was warned by a technical employee of the theater of his imminent arrest by the Nazis. The rulers of the “Thousand Year Reich” had Gellner in their sights as a Jew and as defender of Karl Kraus against the Völkischer Beobachter in a court case a few years ago.

Gellner's apartment was ransacked the same day. With the help of his colleagues Edith Schultze-Westrum and Wiedemann, as well as Falckenberg's chauffeur, he managed to escape, which initially led him to Austria.

Deprived of his career in Germany as well as his personal possessions, Gellner began to build a new life in Prague. He was welcomed with open arms by the director of the New German Theater there , Paul Eger . Until the closure of the theater on October 31, 1938, he was its senior director.

Gellner's fate soon overtook all of his Jewish colleagues: In Munich, the Kammerspiele were “Aryanized” in a very short time and its director Otto Falckenberg wrote his own in the program booklet from 1933/1934 (Issue 3) under the title Destruction of a Legend - A Word on His Own Cause "Proof of Aryan". Gellner's successor as senior director was Wolfgang Petzet .

Shortly after the Munich Agreement signed in 1938 , the Deutsches Theater in Prague was closed. Gellner and his colleagues were sitting in the street. They met daily and, against the background of the public appeal that appeasement politics had in Great Britain, decided to write a review for British theater. The piece was intended to make the British realize that Czechoslovakia was by no means the “far-off country” that Arthur Neville Chamberlain disparagedly called “that we [British] know nothing about”.

Gellner and his colleagues presented the history of Czechoslovakia in their play and emphasized the exemplary creation of a democratic state after the end of Austria-Hungary .

In early 1939 Gellner traveled to England to find an artistic director for the play. When he was successful, he returned to Prague on the night of March 14-15, 1939, despite the misgivings of his English and (already emigrated) German friends. That night Hitler's Wehrmacht occupied Prague. On the morning of March 15, 1939, the city was teeming with Nazi troops.

Gellner was trapped for five months. He made three failed attempts to escape across the Polish border. On his last attempt, the Polish border police handed him over to the SS . Gellner managed to convince the SS man on watch, who was young and inexperienced, with a made up story to let him go back to Prague, back home. After this experience, he saw his last resort in applying to the Gestapo Office to leave the country. On August 29th he was in the last plane that left Prague for London. In the UK, Gellner worked in his brother's business during his first year. Except for his eldest brother Otto, his siblings had fled to England or what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

Otto Gellner was a well-known Prague lawyer. He and his family were murdered by the National Socialists.

London exile and post-war period

When the Czech government-in-exile began working in London, Julius Gellner was no longer classified as an “ enemy alien ” and was given an official work permit.

From 1940 to 1946 he worked as a producer for the German service of the BBC. His focus was on satirical programs, such as Ms. Wernicke . The Frau Wernicke satires were written by Bruno Adler . As a true Berliner, Annemarie Hase played the title character who ridiculed Nazi politics with excessive praise.

Gellner's first production on British soil was Shakespeare's Othello in London's Old Vic (1942). Tolstoy's war and peace followed . Gellner turned down other productions during the war in order to be able to devote himself entirely to the work of the BBC.

After the victory over German National Socialism, Gellner traveled to Germany to report on the situation there on behalf of the BBC. A life there had become unimaginable for him.

In his new home country Great Britain, Gellner established himself as a theater director with numerous productions after the war. Most of the time he worked for the Mermaid Theater in London .

In addition, he worked for the Israeli National Theater Habimah in Tel Aviv from 1949 to 1969 and for a few years for the City Theater of Haifa . During this time, however, he was still based in London.

Gellner has divided his work between the English theater, the Israeli theater and the BBC since 1949. Health problems forced him to give up his theater work in Israel in 1969 .

After the early death of his only daughter in the early 1970s, Gellner largely withdrew from his theater work and dedicated himself to raising his young grandson.

Julius Gellner died on October 24, 1983 in a London hospital.

Web links

• Literature by and about Julius Gellner in the catalog of the German National Library