Column left
The left column was an agitprop troop from the 1920s / 30s for the international workers' aid .
The troupe founded by Helmut Damerius in Berlin in 1927/1928 initially consisted of nine members who were not trained actors: In addition to seven players, a piano player and a chauffeur. Members of the troupe included Kurt Ahrendt ( Arendt ; 1908–1938), Hans Klering , Karl Oefelein (1909–1938), Bruno Schmidtsdorf (1908–1938), Dora Dittmann ( Dorothea Dittmann-Wolff ) and the composer Hans Hauska (1901 -1965).
In 1931, the Links column was awarded a multi-week tour of the Soviet Union for recruiting 16,000 members for International Workers' Aid. Further appearances in Germany were then canceled in connection with the ordinance of the Reich President to combat political excesses .
A number of members went into exile in Moscow , where in 1933, together with members of Troupe 31, a "Deutsches Theater Kolonne Links" established a foothold. There came Dora Dittmann's husband Albert Wolff , Sascha Durnow , Georg Gläser, Werner Grünberg , Rosa Mirelmann , Hanni Schmitz-Rodenberg (1910–1944), Willy Kühne, Erich Olschinski (or Oschinski ; † 1938), Max Mielke and the costume designer Sylta Busse added. Even Friedrich Voss (1903-1938) was at times a member. From 1935 onwards, some of the members of the Links column exiled from Nazi Germany were arrested and in some cases executed by the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs on the basis of hair-raising allegations.
source
literature
- Helmut Damerius: Across ten seas to the center of the world: memories of the "column on the left" . Henschelverlag, Berlin 1977.