Karl Löwenberg

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Karl Löwenberg (also: Carl Loewenberg; born June 23, 1896 in Düsseldorf , † October 14, 1975 in Hamburg ) was a German theater director. After Hitler came to power , he was no longer engaged and emigrated first to Italy and from there to Ecuador in 1939 , where he was the founder and artistic director of the German-language emigrant theater Kammerspiele in Quito . Together with the Free German Stage in Buenos Aires and the theater group Die Komödie in Montevideo, these were the best-known German-speaking emigrant theaters in South America. Karl Löwenberg returned to Germany in the 1950s and last lived in Hamburg.

Life before 1933

The family background of Karl Löwenberg could be clarified with the help of the city archives of the cities of Wuppertal and Düsseldorf. Moritz Löwenberg (born September 25, 1852 in Czersk in the Schwetz district - October 14, 1912 in Düsseldorf), a manufacturer by trade, and his wife Clementine (née Calmer, born November 22, 1865 in Düsseldorf - date of death unknown), both members of the Israelite Religious community, were the parents of three children:

  • Alice Löwenberg (born August 25, 1890 in Elberfeld - † September 19, 1938 in Gardone Riviera )
  • Else Irma Löwenberg (born October 3, 1891 in Düsseldorf).
    She had been married to the Jewish merchant Georg Loewy (born May 20, 1882 in Culm ) since February 12, 1913 , who had moved to Düsseldorf on July 22, 1909, from Berlin. The couple, who de-registered for Dortmund on April 23, 1924, had a daughter: Lieselotte Ruth Loewy (born November 23, 1919).
  • Karl Walter Löwenberg (born June 23, 1896 in Düsseldorf - † October 14, 1975 in Hamburg).

The Löwenberg family moved to Düsseldorf from Elberfeld on November 29, 1890, shortly after the birth of their daughter Alice. Moritz Löwenberg is entered for the first time in the address book of the city of Düsseldorf from 1893 with the addition “manufacturer”. The entry from 1910 shows that he operated a “mechanical weaving mill”. Five years later, in 1915, only the entry "Loewenberg, Moritz, Wwe., Geb." is available for the company and for the private address due to the death of Moritz Löwenberg. Calmer, owner the company M. Loewenberg ”; In 1920 there is no longer an entry. Whether this non-entry from 1920 says that Clementine had also died in the meantime can only be guessed.

No further information is available about Else Irma Löwenberg beyond the facts mentioned above. The other two Löwenberg children have doctorates, Karl as Dr. phil. , but where their academic training took place and where it was completed is not known. And while Karl's career as an employee at German theaters for the period from 1920 to 1933 can be traced almost completely, there is no evidence of Alice's professional or private career. All that is known is that she was married to the banking businessman Ernst Nathan Jacobi (born June 22, 1885 in Berlin - deported to Auschwitz on February 19, 1943 , where his trace is lost) since May 17, 1919. The marriage concluded in Berlin-Charlottenburg was divorced here in 1929; from her the daughter Marion Doria (born May 22, 1920 in Berlin, † December 1, 1987 in Australia) was born.

In the case of Karl Löwenberg, based on his age, one can assume that he did military service in the First World War. An indication of this is a short story from 1916 in the expressionist monthly magazine Die Weiße Blätter . Under the title Lazarett , an unmarked Karl Löwenberg describes a day in a sick bay and the desires and hopes of the injured soldiers from the observer's perspective. The short text Das Pferd in the magazine Die Rheinlande also comes from a Karl Löwenberg who is not presented further .

Reliable life data are only available from the beginning of Löwenberg's professional career, which results in the following engagements up to 1933:

  • 1920/1921 season: According to the Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933 (see sources ) , Karl Löwenberg is said to have had his first engagement as a director and actor in Bamberg .
    This stay in Bamberg is not listed in the register of the city of Darmstadt; there the entries begin with the year 1921 and the place of residence Bonn. This in turn coincides with the information from the city archives of the state capital Düsseldorf, according to which Karl Löwenberg de-registered from Düsseldorf to Bonn on August 31, 1921.
  • 1921/1923 season: Senior director at the Bonn Theater .
  • 1923/1924 season: Director and dramaturge at the Stadttheater Hamburg .
  • 1924/1925 season: senior stage director and dramaturge at the Lübeck City Theater .
    According to the register of the city of Darmstadt, Karl Löwenberg and the actress Hildegard (Hilde) Stefanie Paula Freiin von Zedtwitz (* on October 29, 1899 in Hungary - † January 29, 1888 in Tegucigalpa ) married on June 11, 1925 in Lübeck.
  • 1925/1926 season: director at the Landestheater Darmstadt .
    According to the register, the Löwenbergs moved to Darmstadt on August 20, 1925 and lived at Bruchwiesenstrasse 17 in the middle-class Paulusviertel . ( Location ) The couple's only son, Wolfgang Georg, was born here (born January 31, 1926 in Darmstadt - † November 2, 1998 in Tegucigalpa). The last entry in the register is that the family moved to Stuttgart on June 15, 1926.
  • Period 1926/1928: What the Löwenberg family did in Stuttgart is not known. In the Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 , no commitment is noted for this period.
  • 1928/1930 season: Engagement at the Erfurt Theater .

For the period from 1930 to 1933, the Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933 does not provide any precise information. Following Löwenberg's engagement in Erfurt, it only says: “Besides that, Berlin a. Frankfurt a. M. (Deutsches Schauspielhaus, there assistant → Alwin Kronachers “). Kronacher had been appointed artistic director of the Frankfurt theater in 1929; previously he had been acting director in Leipzig from 1921. The wording “next to it” in the Biographical Handbook leaves open whether Löwenberg should have worked as his assistant before Kronacher moved to Frankfurt or only afterwards.

There is no evidence of Löwenberg's activity in Frankfurt in the files in the Institute for Urban History . On the other hand, Albert Richard Mohr writes in relation to the Frankfurt Römerberg Festival of 1932: “As the press shows, Intendant Dr. Alwin Kronacher and his assistant Dr. Karl Löwenberg, responsible for the crowd scenes, was a resounding success with the second production on the Römerberg. “However, this is the only mention of Löwenberg in the extensive work, and Mohr's sources are not mentioned.

After the Nazi seizure of power were City Theater brought into line . In a municipal resolution no. 222 of May 10, 1933 , the “leave of absence before the contract expires ” is set for Intendant Kronacher, director Fritz Buch, the actors Kurt Katsch and Lothar Rewalt (Regensteiner) and the actress Lydia Buch because they were Jews or suspected of communist sentiments. In this context, too, there is no reference to Karl Löwenberg. There are further documents in another file about the leave of absence with the subsequent release of Kronacher, as Kronacher vigorously defended himself against his release. From this context comes an undated paper entitled Notes on Kronacher's Activity as Director . It was probably written in the second half of March 1933, and it describes in detail Kronacher's work in Frankfurt, including all personnel decisions in his environment. Again, the name of Karl Löwenberg is not mentioned.
Bettina Schältke's very detailed study of the Frankfurt municipal theaters between 1933 and 1945 also contains no direct evidence of Löwenberg's involvement in Frankfurt. She only mentions him as a "former Kronacher assistant" in connection with the Nathan performance by the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden , but fails to provide evidence of where the information about the "former Kronacher assistant" came from. It therefore remains unclear what Karl Löwenberg did after his engagement in Erfurt and before his collaboration with the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden .

Guest director at the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden

In June 1933, the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden ( Kulturbund Deutscher Juden) was founded in Berlin “as a reaction to the exclusion of artists and intellectuals with Jewish roots from German cultural life”. The initiators of the Kulturbund pursued a twofold goal: They wanted to give the excluded Jewish cultural workers the opportunity to continue to perform and pursue their profession, and they were also interested in an audience “who, albeit not yet by law, can participate in the theater , Concerts and other cultural offers were indirectly discussed - it was about the intellectual and cultural self-image that one did not want to be deprived of with the arbitrary act of exclusion. "

Those in charge of the Kulturbund succeeded in setting up an efficient organization and putting together a demanding program in a very short time. It was then possible that on October 1, 1933, the premiere of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play Nathan the Wise could take place in the packed Berlin theater . The performance, in the title role of Kurt Katsch , was "a complete success, which confirmed and further spurred the newly founded ensemble and ignited the spark of togetherness in the audience".

The person who played a major role in this success, but is not even mentioned in the book by Fritsch-Vivié , was the director of the Nathan production: Karl Löwenberg. Fritsch-Vivié is not alone in ignoring the director. In the exhibition catalog Closed Presentation , as in Herbert Freeden's book, Löwenberg is mentioned as a director, but while the performance is discussed in detail, nothing more is learned about him. Some clues about Löwenberg's directorial work, on the other hand, emerge from the contemporary reviews of the first performance. The Jüdische Rundschau wrote about them: “The director Dr. Karl Löwenberg underlined the Jewish note, which was often neglected in the past. Of course, you had to give up some traditional notions of Nathan's character. "This, in turn, seems to have displeased the CV-Zeitung , because there the question was:" But where did the idea of ​​directing come from, at the end of the whole thing a heavy, tragic accent put? Why does the director let Nathan stumble into loneliness after the family ring in the Saladins house has been closed, like a collapsed man, so that one has to fear the worst for him? Should this nuance really correspond to the wise Nathan's attitude to life, his cheerful resignation, firmly resting in God, which he has preserved under the most terrible blows of fate? "

The opposing views of Löwenberg's directorial work did not detract from the success of the play. It was performed a total of ten times in Berlin in October 1933 and then went on tour. In November 1933 two performances took place in the Komödienhaus in Dresden; This was followed, presumably in the first months of 1934, by two performances in the New Theater in Frankfurt am Main and others in Breslau and Gleiwitz. The performance in Leipzig, announced at the end of 1933, does not seem to have taken place, because it is not mentioned in the previously quoted article on the Kulturbund auf Reisen. Instead, however, the piece returned to Berlin for two performances in February 1934.

It is uncertain whether Karl Löwenberg was still present at these performances, or whether he still gave the lecture on the subject of "Directing Problems" announced for March 3, 1934 as part of the lecture cycle "From the work of the theater" organized by the Kulturbund . 1934 was the year in which Karl Löwenberg and his family emigrated to Italy, where his sister was already staying with her daughter.

Stations of exile

Italy

Nothing is known about why Löwenberg decided to emigrate to Italy, nor about what plans he associated with it. In addition to his wife and son, his divorced sister Alice Jacobi and their daughter Marion Doria did the same. The registration office of the city of Gardone Riviera confirmed that Marion Jacobi had lived there since October 5, 1933 and had also been formally registered since August 31, 1937. It is not known for whom of the Löwenberg and Jacobi families this registration data still applies.

There is indirect evidence that Karl Löwenberg supported Alice Jacobi in founding her school on Lake Garda in Gardone Riviera . The Hamburg pedagogue Fritz C. Neumann , who was banned from working under the Nazis, reported in his memoir that he had received a letter from Italy in early 1935. An unknown "Herr Löwenberg" let him know that his sister Alice Jacobi was planning to open a boarding school for Jewish children from Germany in Gardone Riviera. He, Fritz C. Neumann, had been suggested for a position there by Paul Geheeb , who now lives in Switzerland . Further evidence of Löwenberg's activities in Italy is not known. There is also no evidence of who the connection to Paul Geheeb came about through, nor is there any evidence of whether his son attended his aunt's school.

Italy had passed a race law on September 7, 1938 , which revoked the citizenship of all Jews who had been naturalized in Italy since 1919 and threatened the expulsion of all non-Italian Jews. It was thus foreseeable that a stay in Italy for the Löwenbergs and for Alice Jacobi and her daughter was only possible on a temporary basis. For Alice Jacobi, however, this was no longer relevant: she died on September 19, 1938 and was buried in Gardone Riviera. The Löwenbergs left Italy in 1939 with their nineteen-year-old niece Marion. Again, there is only one confirmation for the niece, Marion Jacobi. According to the registration office of Gardone Riviera, she left Italy on January 21, 1939 for New York. However, the Ellis Island database does not have entries for Marion Jacobi or her uncle's family for the subsequent period.

Ecuador

“Ecuador was one of the countries in Latin America to which a comparatively small number of those persecuted by the Nazi regime fled. [..] For most of the 3500-4000 people who found refuge by 1942, Ecuador was a second choice country of exile, which they accepted because they saw no chance of finding asylum in a preferred country in time. The majority came from Germany and Austria and only after the pogrom night in November 1938 had given up the last hope of still being able to stay in their homeland. Some settled in Guayaquil , the largest city in the country in the hot tropical climate on the Pacific. The overwhelming majority preferred the capital Quito, located in the Andes at over 2800 m. "

It is not known whether for Löwenberg "Ecuador was a second choice country of exile" when he arrived here in March 1939, nor is it known whether he had connections here. In any case, his niece, Marion Doria Jacobi, moved on and moved to Australia. She was married there to Herbert Marx (* June 16, 1923 - † June 24, 2006).

Despite the relatively small number of emigrants in Quito, they maintained a wide range of associations that included religious groups as well as secular and political groups. After Kreuter, the Jewish community formed the largest group among the refugees. From it emerged in 1938 the association Asociatión de Beneficencia Israelita (short: Beneficencia ), originally an aid association that also made cultural offers. On the secular and political side, the Movimiento Alemán Pro Democracia y Libertad (short: Movimiento ) , founded in 1942, was the organization with the largest number of members, especially for people “who did not feel connected to Judaism either religiously or culturally. [..] As in other countries, battles of direction took place in Ecuador based on the two most important associations of Latin American exile, the movement 'Free Germany' (Mexico) and The Other Germany (Buenos Aires). The disputes over the impartiality of the association led in 1944 to the fact that the proponents of connection to the Mexico towards their own organization, the Committee for Free Germany ', founded. "This committee had its own magazine, which by Bobby Astor issued Democratic Germany , in which articles about the Kammerspiele appeared again and again . Astor himself also performed there.

Karl Löwenberg also moved in this area of ​​tension between the religious and political emigrant milieus. He had been a member of the Movimiento since 1943 , whose cultural department was headed by Alfred Graf , but he gave his first lecture on his intention to found a theater in Quito on August 6, 1942 as an event of the Beneficencia , whose cultural advisor Paul Benedick (1894 –1953) was the former co-owner of the Berlin real estate company Israel Schmidt Söhne. According to Kreuter, Löwenberg and his theater were “a cultural link between different immigrant groups [...]. Not only Germans played here, and actors and spectators came from two 'camps', so to speak, that of the Jewish community and that of the political associations. "

The chamber plays

The foundation

The title of the aforementioned lecture by Löwenberg was: "The theater as a cultural asset"; The title “Jewish theater directors and actors” is in brackets, and he himself is presented as senior director. It seems that this lecture was addressed even more to a Jewish audience, as a contemporary review shows: “The lecturer advocates the view that the local Jewish community devotes itself to the cultivation of Jewish theatrical art and regular presentations Jewish poets should take place. Only in this way could it be possible to maintain cultural life and to convey fruitful ideas to the youth, who have never got to know real theater life. "

Although a committee was set up after this event to prepare theater evenings, the first performance did not take place as a theater of the Jewish community, but as a theater des Movimiento . The group called itself Das Spiel and performed one-act plays by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (The Woman in the Window) and Arthur Schnitzler ( Anatol's Wedding Morning ) in the Movimiento clubhouse at the end of August or beginning of September 1943 . Hildegard Löwenberg, Huberta Reuscher-Heimann and Karl Löwenberg played the three roles in Hofmannsthal's play; Only amateur actors appeared in the Schnitzler play.

The group Das Spiel seems to have only performed two more pieces in the Movimiento clubhouse , namely Lady Windermeres Fan by Oscar Wilde in December 1943 and then Anton Chekhov's one-act play The Marriage Proposal . At the same time, a restructuring and clarification process apparently took place behind the scenes, from which a new theater and a new venue emerged: The Kammerspiele Quito. Free independent theater , which from then on played in a room in the Löwenberg family's private home. According to an article in Democratic Germany from October 1944, the subtitle should "indicate that the management has renounced any political ties and only wants to pursue artistic goals". It is not known whether Löwenberg renounced his membership in the Movimiento or whether it turned to the Committee for Free Germany .

On October 1, 1944, the first performance of the new theater took place at its new venue, which could seat around 60 spectators. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (Burnbury) was played as the opening track . It was preceded by a prologue poem by Hans Heiman, which “dealt with the question of why the opening of a theater was justified in these times of horror”. The last stanza read: “And how in fear and pity you experience today / All of the oppressed hardship, the jubilation of the liberated, / So may the images of life that we reproduce / Your sympathetic compassion accompany you. / From the pressures of everyday life should be liberating You raise / The stage mirror sight of our own humanities: / That in such a time the human being should reflect / Is our goal and wish. Well! The game begins! "

Excursus: Hanns Heimann

The catalog of the German National Library (DNB) knows a "writer" Hanns Heiman , for whom Hanns Guzman and Hanns Heiman Guzman are given as additional names. His publications include economic and legal titles as well as publications on immigration issues and poetry. Other books associated with the name Hanns Heimann deal with shipping on the Neckar, but are not included in the DNB catalog. One of them, entitled Die Neckarschiffahrt since the introduction of towage , is Heiman's dissertation, published in Berlin in 1905 at the High Philosophical Faculty of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . The curriculum vitae printed in the appendix states: “I was born in Breslau on February 14, 1879, as the son of the businessman Leo Heiman and his wife Emma, ​​nee. Guttsmann. After I had my first education in my parents' house, I attended the humanistic high school in St. Maria Magdalena in my hometown. I left his Prima in 1896 in order to gain practical knowledge for my economic studies in more than three years of commercial activity; I started this in the winter semester of 1898/99 at the University of Breslau. I completed my military service in Munich in October 1899/1900. To continue and complete my studies, I moved to Heidelberg University in the 1900/01 winter semester. Initially also active in literature, I devoted myself here from late summer 1901 to spring 1902 to the special investigation into a larger treatise on The 'Neckar Schiffer'. I submitted one of the present parts to obtain a doctorate in philosophy at the Rupert-Carola of the high faculty; on July 19, 1902, I passed the doctorate examination. ”Other stages in his life are known: He was an economic advisor and member of the main committee of the Reich Association of German Industry ; he was able to emigrate to Ecuador and worked from 1940 to 1944 at the University of Quito. The name addition Guzman , which is temporarily used in Ecuador, refers to the mother's maiden name mentioned in the curriculum vitae.

Maria-Luise Kreuter counts Hanns Heimann among the leading intellectuals in Quito. He had "tried to pass on European humanities in immigration". Heimann, who had succeeded in bringing his extensive private library to Ecuador, did not achieve material success here. “In the first years of exile he worked at various educational establishments, including the Universidad Central, and earned 'too much to die and too little to live on'.” He worked for the pharmaceutical company LIFE (see below) , gave lectures and published a book on immigration in Ecuador, which was published by Carlos G. Liebmann and with which he made his debut as a publisher in Quito in 1942.

On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Hanns Heiman received the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1959. He was glad that “the first person to receive this medal in Quito was a Jew, but this should by no means be misinterpreted as forgetting the past. Heiman was one of those who built a bridge between the Jewish and non-Jewish persecuted by the Nazi regime. "

His wife, Huberta Reuscher-Heiman, a non-Jew, was part of the Kammerspiele ensemble .

The actors of the early days

"With the exception of Huberta Reuscher-Heiman and Hildegard Löwenberg, who only appeared on the stage in the first few plays, everyone started out as amateur actors and was introduced to acting by Löwenberg." In this context, Patrik von zur Mühlen speaks of the fact that the stage in Quito “despite the participation of professional actors and directors, I never exceeded the framework of a amateur theater”, and “the conversion into a self-sustaining, independent theater could be ruled out from the outset in view of the comparatively small number of emigrants. However, director Karl Löwenberg later organized Spanish-language performances for a wider audience and, with the drama school he founded in Quito, made an offer to locals as well. ”The émigré press explicitly warned against speaking of amateur theater in view of the achievements. The training at the Kammerspiele was confidently compared with the “training in European theaters” and it was pointed out that “the most important Russian theaters were created in this way”. Löwenberg's productions, “his directorial work based on speed and contrast”, found “recognition”.

Actress Vera Kohn (center)
Vera Kohn (left) together with René Taube (right)

Before the opening of the Kammerspiele in June 1944, Huberta Reuscher-Heiman and Hildegard Löwenberg performed a series of scenes in the Jewish community under the title Persecuted People , which revolved around the fate of Christian women and their Jewish husbands. The performance was accompanied by music by Chopin, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. It is not known why they were both no longer on stage later in the Kammerspiele . Kreuter belongs to the core of the ensemble:

  • Gerti Goldmann
    Apart from the fact that she played a “leading role” in the Kammerspiele , there is hardly any further information about her. She left Quito in 1948 and died in a car accident in 1950.
  • Vera Kohn-Kagan (1912–2012)
    Kreuter praises her as a star of the Kammerspiele , which "later achieved success in Spanish in front of an Ecuadorian audience".
  • Inge Friedberg
    Wenzel Goldbaum , who also worked as a theater critic in Ecuador, described Inge Friedberger, together with Huberta Reuscher-Heiman, Vera Kohn-Kagan and Gerti Goldmann, "as a quartet of female performers that many big stages could envy the ensemble".
  • René Taube & Renate Aron
    After Kreuter, René Taube was the “outstanding actor of those early years” and came from Vienna. She does not go into further detail about Renate Aron, who played at least two pieces.

This initial core group of the Kammerspiele was joined by other actors, almost all of whom came from the Jewish community. One who is not mentioned by Kreuter was Egon Schwarz , who came to Ecuador on his odyssey through South America in 1945 and went to Quito. When listing his activities in the answer to the self-asked question about what he was up to during this time in Quito, it says, among other things: “I worked as an actor in an emigrant theater, where we have everything from Curt Götz to Schiller is funny or effective on stage in German drama. "

A specialist in a completely different field was Heinrich Tietz, who from 1948 "mainly came out with comic roles". In 1940 the Laboratorios Industriales Farmacéuticos Ecuatorianos ( LIFE ) were founded, after Kreuter in the 1940s the largest company founded by immigrants in Ecuador. The company, which works closely with government agencies, and its pharmaceutical laboratories should contribute to “improving the health care of the population and reducing the total dependence on imported medicines. Up until then there were only a few small laboratories that produced few drugs. Finally, in 1937, funds were available to purchase the necessary equipment in Germany and to hire the chemist and pharmacist Heinrich Tietz, who had been dismissed from the Berlin company HAGEDA for racial reasons. Tietz arrived in Ecuador in March 1938 and installed the equipment that had arrived from Germany in painstaking detail work, almost entirely on his own, and began producing some medicines. Until his untimely death in 1965 he remained the responsible pharmacist whose main task was in the field of galenics, the process in which the active ingredients are brought into a form that makes them usable for the human body. "

As another director from the early days, Kreuter mentions Gerardo Gotthelf, a musicologist who may have primarily staged pieces of music. In December 1945 he was responsible for a festive Hanukkah evening in which, among other things, parts from Georg Friedrich Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabaeus were performed, "played and sung by a choir and orchestra made up of music lovers and musicians from the Jewish community and the conservatory" . After that, at the beginning of 1946, together with Karl Löwenberg, he was responsible for the performance of Jean Racine's tragedy Esther . “In June 1946 Gotthelf said goodbye by staging scenes from Jacques Halevy's opera Die Jüdin . Gotthelf first went to Uruguay and died in Switzerland in 1949. "

In Bernhard Hetzenauer's documentary, Vera Kohn mentions that her husband, Karl Kohn, was also involved in the theater work: he painted backdrops. Kreuter only mentions Werner Rosenthal, who did this in the early days of the Kammerspiele , and Oswaldo Guayasamín , who designed stage sets in 1947.

The repertoire of the Kammerspiele

In the early years - up to May 1948 - “around thirty pieces had been performed in German. On average, a new production came out about every two months. Comedies and comedies made up the largest share of the repertoire, which predominated in the first (1944/45) and fourth (1947/48) season. Franz Molnar was one of the most played authors alongside Schnitzler, Chekhov and Shaw. Apart from one performance each by Molière, Racine, Kotzebue and Schiller, whose »Kabale und Liebe« was the only classic drama, the authors came from the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries. ”There are some indications that the restriction was deliberately done in comedies and comedies, but often for quite banal reasons it was not possible to expand the repertoire: “The procurement of German-language stage texts was a problem of the first order. It was noticeable even in Buenos Aires and found its immediate expression in the fact that the 'Free German Stage' was laboriously building up an archive of typewritten copied stage texts. ”On August 20, 1945, Löwenberg therefore wrote to Albert Maurer (1890–1969) in Montevideo, where Fred Heller (1889–1949) built Die Komödie together in September 1941 , and a letter to Paul Walter Jacob in Buenos Aires followed on March 26, 1946 : “I have a small chamber theater here (German), but we do suffer greatly from the lack of pieces. [..] Wouldn't you have the great kindness to send me at my expense a copy of Three Weddings , The Five Frankfurter and Threepenny Opera ? The things would come back to you immediately after I had them copied. "

The play The Five Frankfurter , a “historicizing comedy by Carl Rössler ” about the five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild , was performed like many similar plays, presumably due to a lack of contemporary material. That only changed from around 1948.

From November 1947 to March 1948, the Kammerspiele took a break from playing, interrupted by two performances in the rooms of the Beneficencia , and then started the new season in April 1948 with pieces by Hofmannsthal and Georges Courteline . In May 1948 “a contemporary French drama was performed for the first time,“ Die Wilde ”by Jean Anouilh , which was followed a year later by“ Antigone ”and shortly thereafter the comedy“ The Honorable Whore ”by Jean Paul Sartre . However, this piece, in the leading role with Hanka Wasiel, was not played under the original title, but as "Black and White" so as not to offend the immigrants' "mimosa-like morality" with the title. The audience was not so miraculous, they “weren't stingy with the applause.” Karl Löwenberg pointed out in a letter dated October 28, 1948 to Paul Walter Jacob that the Anouilh pieces had also reached the audience was now able to offer a piece for his part: “Of course, I am also happy to be at your disposal with what I have here. Among other things, you should be interested in a work by Anouilh, which was performed here with great success. ”In the Antigone performance, Löwenberg had also taken on the role of speaker in addition to the direction; Vera Kohn-Kagan played the title role, René Taube gave Creon.

If comedies and comedies predominated in the repertoire for the reasons mentioned, this does not mean that more political pieces were not performed. However, problems of the present often found themselves in events that organized the Kammerspiele outside of their regular schedule. Often it was not about theater performances, but about cabaret and recitation evenings or readings that were also held at other venues. On the occasion of a special lessing event in 1945 , Löwenberg was attested that he did not just want to amuse his theater, and in December 1945 a premiere on a decidedly political topic took place in the Kammerspiele . It was a staged reading of Wenzel Goldbaum's drama Dorothea educates the Germans . “In four acts Goldbaum had developed his idea of ​​the pointlessness of wanting to educate the German people to democracy. As in the political debates, he expressed his thesis that the "other Germany" does not exist. "

The story of a performance from 1945 is a bit confused. The New York emigre magazine Aufbau reported on July 13, 1945 on page 8: “The former German director Dr. Karl Löwenberg has built a chamber theater in Quito, Ecuador, in which he recently performed scenes from Bert Brecht's 'Life of the Master Race' and from Ferdinand Bruckner 's 'The Liberated'. “Exactly, but without reference to the construction article , repeated Fritz Pohle. Kreuter, on the other hand, quotes Democratic Germany from January 1945, in which Löwenberg was accused of considering the play The Life of the Master Race , which in the article is solely attributed to Brecht, to be outdated. Kreuter leaves open whether the piece was played. But since the article appeared six months after the article in Democratic Germany , one must assume that Löwenberg did perform the piece after all. In this case, Brecht's life of the master race stands for the American version of his play Furcht und Elend des Third Reich , written in 1942/43 , which was performed in the USA under the title The Private Life of the Master Race .

Presumably, the previously cited accusation from Democratic Germany is to be seen against the background of the demands of the Committee Free Germany to induce theaters to take explicit political positions, to express themselves in an anti-fascist way, i.e. to propagate a pro-communist policy. Whether Löwenberg bowed to this pressure in connection with the Brecht-Bruckner piece cannot be clarified. As a rule, however, such appeals for a more political theater were not heard in the Kammerspiele . Instead, Kreuter refers to events there on rather “political-philosophical issues of the time”, for example on the occasion of Goethe's 200th birthday in 1949 or in memory of George Bernard Shaw, who died in 1950, in February 1951.

However, a play that was performed in August 1950 was very contemporary: Igal Mossinsohn's drama In den Steppe des Negev . The play takes place in 1948 in a kibbutz enclosed by Palestinian Arabs and wanted to show Israel as the only non-discriminatory refuge for Jews. "Although the performance, which was funded by the Zionist organization, was preceded by weeks of rehearsals, the play was only performed once in the Teatro Espejo in Quito to a sold-out house."

The year 1951 marked a turning point in the history of the Kammerspiele . Up to then about 50 pieces had been performed, but "in 1951 the Kammerspiele had practically ceased to exist as a German-speaking theater".

From the chamber plays to the Teatro de Camara

The Kammerspiele made their first attempt in Spanish in the summer of 1946 with the performance of Blanca Nieves y los Siete Enanos - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . This was followed in 1947 by a performance at the Teatro Nacional Sucre with the participation of Ecuadorian actors. Was played A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen with Gerti Goldmann in the title role.

Program sheet for a performance at the Teatro Experimental Universitario with a picture by Vera Kohn (around 1951)

Kreuter counts one of Löwenberg's particular achievements in “building a European-style theater in Spanish in Quito”. The Ibsen piece was the first step in this direction. This was accompanied by a farewell to the previous actors of the Kammerspiele , because from then on Löwenberg worked with actors “from Ecuador and other Latin American countries. The plays listed, as far as they are available, required a relatively small number of actors, between three and a maximum of eight people. ”From the old tribe, only Vera Kohn-Kagan remained, who learned the Spanish language, took language and singing lessons and for some Time also went to the USA to take acting classes.

Kreuter reports on a checkered history of the theater, which is now presenting itself as Teatro de Camara , although Löwenberg could count on official support.

“Theater lovers from the university sector, from the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana Institute, from time to time from the Ministry of Education and from among the city's politicians in charge supported the efforts of the Löwenbergschen Teatro de Camara, as part of an Asociación Teatro Moderno Works of World Literature, which he founded to perform in Quito. Various theater associations were also formed on the Ecuadorian side, and Löwenberg directed their productions and served as artistic director. His productions appeared as presentations by the Teatro Experimental Universitario , the Teatro Intimo or the Teatro Moderno . Although the selection of the pieces and the type of staging were not primarily aimed at a broad audience, but rather at a small circle of artistically interested intellectuals, there were performances that were accessible to a wider public. Individual schools, the post office or the central bank bought entire performances for the pupils or their employees, the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana and the »LIFE« took over the patronage of performances and contributed financially as well as propagandistically to the success. The performances attracted the interest of the press, and Löwenberg appeared here as the person who had made the theater in Quito a breakthrough in the first place, and Vera Kohn-Kagan as the "figure in the foreground of the Ecuadorian theater world", who had all the means of modern theater decreed. "

In contrast to the Kammerspiele , Löwenberg experimented with working techniques and forms of representation; the program included contemporary pieces by Charles de Peyret-Chappuis , Eugene O'Neill , Thornton Wilder , Ugo Betti and Tennessee Williams , as well as pieces by William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov . Pieces by the Ecuadorian author Demetrio Aguilera Malta and the Mexican Rodolfo Usigli were also performed . According to Kreuter, Löwenberg oriented himself towards Konstantin Sergejewitsch Stanislawski when designing the roles and focused on "inner truthfulness". Based on a publication by Löwenberg in 1954, she writes: "It should be a» theater without illusion «, in which the actors neither copy life nor emotions, but rather live the role without embellishment in front of the audience."

In 1955 Karl Löwenberg directed Graham Greene's play The Living Room . The accompanying program contains one of Löwenberg's last statements about his ideas about theater.

“If the theater is not a 'mirror of time', it is not a theater. I don't just mean the stage play, but even more the presentation. I know that art is never really 'experimental'. Experiment is something imperfect in the eyes of the audience. But during my life for the theater I have always looked for new experiences, from realism to expressionism . The audience can experience what our ensemble has achieved through rehearsals with extraordinary sacrifices in two months. ›Living Room‹ poses a problem of our day: two fundamental forces, religion and science, both linked to our political and social life. "

Hamburg

Kreuter concludes that Löwenberg's “efforts to create a modern European-style theater in Quito [...] were not granted permanent success. In the memories of immigrants, however , the Kammerspiele are still one of the proud results of the cultural will to survive in exile. ”It is questionable whether this assessment from 1995, the year your book was published, is still valid today. On the website JEWS OF ECUADOR you can still find isolated references to people who belonged to the actors of the Kammerspiele, but there is no direct reference to them or to Karl Löwenberg. And in the already mentioned documentary AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY , the Kammerspiele are briefly mentioned in the interview with Vera Kohn-Kargan , but the name Löwenbergs is not mentioned.

Information about his private life is also sparse. Although an actress, Hilde Löwenberg did not play any more roles in the Kammerspiele , and the later marriage in Hamburg proves that the couple must have divorced. Probably after this separation, Hilde Löwenberg and their son Georg Wolfgang moved to Honduras, where she also died and where numerous descendants of the Löwenberg family now live.

What prompted Karl Löwenberg to leave Ecuador and settle in Hamburg is not known, just as little is known about what he did in his Hamburg years. In her remarks about the Teatro de Camara, Kreuter relies on its repertoire up to 1956, which suggests that Karl Löwenberg was still in Ecuador at that time. In 1959 the name Karl Löwenberg first appeared in the Hamburg address book . The last address book published before his death dates from 1970. He is listed here again as a director under the same address as before. Before that, however, there was the already mentioned second marriage: According to the archives of the state capital Düsseldorf, he married Wilma Elma Anna Gatzke on February 19, 1969 in Barmbeck-Uhlenhorst. No further life data are known about her, but there are many references to an actress Wilma Gatzke, who in 1941 belonged to the ensemble of the Hamburg Low German Stage , from which the Ohnsorg Theater later emerged. Here, too, she was one of the actresses. From October 1963 to January 1968 Gatzke played at the Junge Theater in Hamburg. In the 1966/1967 season she had a role in Lessing's Nathan the Wise , and later Wilma Gatzke also took part in various TV films, including the Tatort episode 207, which was broadcast in July 1988, entitled Spuk aus der Eiszeit .

swell

literature

  • Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? Exile in an unknown country 1938 to the end of the 1950s , Metropol, Berlin, 1975, ISBN 3-926893-27-3 .
    Under the title Donde queda el Ecuador? Exilio en un país desconocido desde 1938 hasta fines de los años cincuentas , the book was published in 1997 in Quito in Spanish.
  • Maria-Luise Kreuter: Ecuador , in: Claus-Dieter Krohn, Patrik von zur Mühlen, Gerhard Paul, Lutz Winkler (eds.): Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 . Special edition, 2nd, unchanged edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2008, ISBN 978-3-534-21999-5 , pp. 208-212.
  • Gabriele Fritsch-Vivié: Against all odds. The Jewish Cultural Association 1933–1941 , Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin, 2013, ISBN 978-3-95565-005-6 .
  • Akademie der Künste (Ed.): Closed presentation. The Jewish Cultural Association in Germany 1933–1941 , Berlin, 1992 (catalog for the exhibition of the same name from January to April 1992).
  • Herbert Freeden: Jewish Theater in Nazi Germany , Ullstein materials, Frankfurt / Berlin, 1985, ISBN 3-548-35233-2 .
  • Fritz Pohle: Emigration theater in South America away from the "Free German Stage", Buenos Aires , series of publications by the P. Walter Jacob Archive, No. 2, Hamburg, 1989, ISBN 978-3-9802151-0-7 .
  • Patrik von zur Mühlen: Latin America as an escape destination. German emigration 1933–1945: political activities and socio-cultural integration , Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn, 1988, ISBN 978-3-87831-472-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e City Archives of the City of Wuppertal: Written information from April 23, 2019; City archive of the state capital Düsseldorf, written information from June 18, 2019
  2. ^ Commemorative book victims of the persecution of the Jews under the Nazi tyranny in Germany 1933-1945
  3. ↑ Die Weisse Blätter , Volume 1, Number 3, March 1916
  4. ^ The Rhineland , quarterly publication of the Association of Art Friends in the Countries on the Rhine - 25.1915, p. 424
  5. ↑ The following stages of his theater activities follow the description in the Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933 (see sources )
  6. ↑ a b c d Darmstadt City Archives: holdings ST 12/18, older population registers, no. 593–595
  7. ^ Family tree Hildegard Stefanie Paula von Zedtwitz
  8. ↑ Institute for Urban History, Files on the Städtische Bühnen 189 . Here is a fee calculation for October 1, 1931 for the entire artistic staff, including the artistic director and his immediate environment. Karl Löwenberg does not appear in this and another dated October 5, 1932.
  9. ^ Albert Richard Mohr: Das Frankfurter Schauspiel 1929–1944. A documentation on theater history with contemporary reports and pictures , Verlag Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, ISBN 978-3-7829-0153-6 , p. 59
  10. ^ Institute for Urban History: Municipal files 7.965
  11. ^ Institute for Urban History: Municipal files 7.970
  12. ^ Bettina Schältke: Theater or Propaganda? The municipal theaters of Frankfurt am Main 1933-1945 , Verlag Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main, 1997, ISBN 3-7829-0464-8 , p. 96
  13. ↑ a b c Gabriele Fritsch-Vivié: Against all resistance , p. 11
  14. ↑ The database of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin also contains no reference to Löwenberg in its “Juedischer-Kulturbund” collection .
  15. ↑ Quoted frommonths sheets , Heft 2 (1933), pp. 10-12
  16. ↑ Der Kulturbund auf Reisen , in: Monatsblätter , Heft 5 (1934), pp. 20-21
  17. ↑ monthly sheets , issue 5 (1933), p. 15
  18. ↑ monthly pages , issue 1 (1934), p. 10
  19. ↑ monthly sheets , issue 5 (1933), p. 15
  20. ↑ Frithjof Trapp (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon of Theater Artists
  21. ↑ a b CITTA 'DI GARDONE RIVIERA, Servizi Demografici: Information on registration data of the Jacobi & Löwenberg families from February 22, 1919
  22. ^ Fritz C. Neumann: Memoirs of a contemporary , unpublished manuscript in English, edited by Lisel Mueller , Libertiville, 1965, p. 192. A copy of the manuscript was kindly made available by the library of the German Historical Institute in Washington.
  23. ↑ Written communication from her granddaughter Madeleine Ausbruch, who lives in Perth , on April 19, 2019
  24. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Ecuador , pp. 208-209. Patrik von zur Mühlen only speaks of 2500 German-speaking emigrants in Ecuador. ( Patrik von zur Mühlen: German Exile in Latin America. Cultural and political activities after the flight , Latin America News, number 251, May 1995).
  25. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 251
  26. ↑ Eva Zelig's documentary AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY from 2015 (in English) deals with her and her descendants . Background material for the film can be found on the An Unknown Country website . Telling the story of European Jews who escaped Nazi persecution to find refuge in an unlikely destination .
  27. ^ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Ecuador , p. 210
  28. ^ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Ecuador , p. 211
  29. ↑ Bobby Astor was born as Heinz Alfred Stern on March 17, 1908 in Idar-Oberstein , died on February 2, 1983 in Bern and was a musician and cabaret artist. ( Lexicon of persecuted musicians from the Nazi era: Bobby Astor ) More about him from Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador? , P. 214 ff. And p. 224 ff. And in the biographical database of the Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship : Handbook Who Was Who in the GDR? : Stern, Heinz Alfred
  30. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 225
  31. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 252. According to a communication from the Archives of Social Democracy dated May 8, 2019, they are in possession of Karl and Hilde Löwenberg's declarations of accession to the Movimiento from 1943.
  32. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 231
  33. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 235
  34. ↑ Christoph von Schwanenflug: DRÖLL & SCHEUERMANN, FORMERLY ISRAEL SCHMIDT SÖHNE , Immobilien Zeitung, August 12, 2010
  35. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 230
  36. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 239
  37. ↑ Quoted from Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador? , Pp. 250-251
  38. ↑ See: Figure Lexicon for The Woman in the Window
  39. ↑ Quoted from Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador? , P. 252
  40. ↑ Quoted from Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador? , P. 252
  41. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 253
  42. ↑ Quoted from Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador? , P. 253
  43. ↑ Hanns Heimann in the catalog of the DNB (1) and Hanns Heimann in the catalog of the DNB (2)
  44. ↑ Heiman's books on Neckar shipping and shipping on the Neckar
  45. ^ Hanns Heimann: Neckar boatman
  46. ^ Association for the history of Berlin eV: 1938 - building blocks for a history of the association during National Socialism
  47. ↑ a b c Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , Pp. 289-290
  48. ↑ There is a detailed overview of books by Hanns Heimann in WorldCat : Author Hanns Heiman
  49. ^ LBI-Database - Jewish Publishers of German Literature in Exile, 1933–1945: Casa Editora Liebmann : “In 1942 Carlos G. Liebmann founded the Casa Editora Liebmann in Ecuador. The publisher initially specialized in legal books, including those by Alfred Karger, but eventually began publishing a variety of South American authors. The company and the associated bookstore shaped the intellectual life of Ecuador in the 1950s and 1960s.
    Liebmann previously worked in publishing in Munich and Berlin. During the Nazi era he was temporarily interned in a concentration camp. In 1939 he emigrated with his family to France and then to Ecuador, where he initially traded in German-language used books, stamps and stationery. While growing up in an assimilated family in Berlin, he played an active role in the Jewish community in Ecuador. "
  50. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 254
  51. ↑ Patrik von zur Mühlen: Escape destination Latin America , p. 99
  52. ↑ Quoted from Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador? , P. 254
  53. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 260
  54. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , Pp. 241-242
  55. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 262
  56. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 253
  57. ↑ Wenzel Goldbaum, quoted from Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador? , P. 253
  58. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , Pp. 253-254
  59. ^ Egon Schwarz: No time for Eichendorff. Chronicle of involuntary wandering years , Gutenberg Book Guild , 1992, ISBN 3-7632-4059-4 , pp. 220-221
  60. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 254
  61. ↑ LIFE homepage
  62. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , Pp. 279-280
  63. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 242. Unfortunately, Kreuter does not mention the form in which this elaborate work was staged with the limited possibilities of the Kammerspiele in Quito.
  64. ↑ Bernhard Hetzenauer: And in the middle of the earth there was fire , 2013 (1h 18min). A trailer is available on youtube .
  65. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 255
  66. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 255
  67. ^ A b c Fritz Pohle: Emigrationstheater in Südamerica , pp. 10–11, and notes 8 and 9 on p. 89
  68. ^ "Albert Maurer, b. on January 31, 1890 in Wiesbaden, actor, director and theater director, has worked on numerous German theaters since 1918, including in Munich and Heidelberg, and for film. In 1926 he became director of the Bochum Operetta Theater and in 1930 artistic director of the Schumanntheater in Frankfurt am Main. After his exclusion from the Reich Chamber of Culture in 1936, he emigrated with his Jewish wife to Uruguay, where in 1941 he founded the “Komödie” together with Fred Heller. Maurer died on April 26th, 1969 in Montevideo. "(Fritz Pohle: Emigrationstheater in Südamerica , p. 21)
  69. ^ "The writer, journalist and theater critic Fred Heller, b. on April 16, 1889 in Obersiebenbrunn, Lower Austria, emigrated in 1938 via Italy and Czechoslawakia to Uruguay, where he worked as an employee of the Argentinian daily newspaper and the Jewish newsreel. He published two books for Editorial Cosmopolita in Buenos Aires, Life Begins Again: The Fates of Emigration (1945) and the novel Family Album of a City (1948). The Bonaeren performance of the comedy The Curtain Falls, like the other plays by Heller, took place in the “Free German Stage”. Heller died on April 12, 1949 in Montevideo. "(Fritz Pohle: Emigrationstheater in Südamerica , p. 19)
  70. ^ The five Frankfurters
  71. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 255
  72. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 256
  73. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 258
  74. ^ Digitized edition of the structure published in New York from 1934–2004 online
  75. ^ Fritz Pohle: Emigration theater in South America , p. 9
  76. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , Pp. 256-257
  77. ^ The Institute For The Translation Of Hebrew Literature: Igal Mossinsohn . See also: en: Yigal Mossinson
  78. ↑ In WorldCat, the play is listed as the only non-Hebrew edition under the title Sands of the Negev (as a translation for a New York performance in 1954). ( Sands of the Negev )
  79. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 256. The Teatro Espejo probably means the Teatro Bolívar , which is located in the Pasaje Espejo in the Centro Histórico of Quito. ( El Teatro Bolívar )
  80. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 258
  81. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , Pp. 255-256, 261
  82. ^ A b Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , Pp. 261-262
  83. ↑ Encyclopedia.com: Usigli, Rodolfo (1905–1979)
  84. ↑ a b c Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 264
  85. ↑ Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador located? , P. 265
  86. ↑ JEWS OF ECUADOR
  87. ↑ pedigree Georg Wolfgang Loewemberg of Zedtwitz
  88. ↑ Actresses of the Low German Stage 1941
  89. ↑ Actors of the Ohnsorg Theater
  90. ↑ Communication from Ernst Deutsch Theater GmbH dated August 13, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Löwenberg, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Loewenberg, Carl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater director
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1975
Place of death Hamburg