Leo Kerz

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Leo Kerz (born November 1, 1912 in Berlin ; died November 4, 1976 in New York ) was a German-American set designer and theater producer. He was the only member of the Jewish Kerz family to survive the Holocaust .

Life

Family and education

Leo Kerz was the son of Nathan Kerz and Nechuma Spira, who had come to Berlin from Galicia , Austria-Hungary , in 1910 and ran a ladies' tailoring business there, which they expanded into a fashion business with regular fashion shows and around 20 employees. Leo Kerz had a younger sister, Charlotte. He attended secondary school and from 1928 to 1932 did an apprenticeship as a set designer with Traugott Müller , who designed stage designs for the state theater. Works by Kerz were shown in exhibitions during his apprenticeship, around 1931 in the gallery of Alfred Flechtheim .

Emigration in 1933, marriage and fate of the family

As a politically leftist artist, Kerz emigrated to Prague after the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933 . He no longer saw any possibility of mobilizing the workers through a general strike and accused the trade unions and social democracy of failing that they had not tried to do so before the seizure of power. A strike actually had to take place when Franz von Papen was appointed Reich Chancellor by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg in June 1932. The publisher Helmut Kindler describes in his memoirs an encounter with Kerz shortly before he left Berlin. Afterwards Kerz said to him: “If Germans treat Germans like that, I don't want to complain about what is happening to us Jews. [...] Helmut, I'm not staying in this country. I'll be in Prague tomorrow. ”In November 1933, the parents emigrated to The Hague with their daughter Charlotte, who was born in 1914 . Leo Kerz followed them in February 1934, but did not receive a work permit and went first to London , then Johannesburg .

In Johannesburg in 1936 he married the athlete Martha Jacob , a German Jew whom he had already met in the Netherlands. The couple separated three years later. Kerz was then married to Rosa Resi from 1938 to 1962, they had two children, and then with Louise Manning, with whom he also had two children.

Kerz co-founded the Johannesburg Pioneer Theater, which is considered to be the first avant-garde theater in South Africa and "one of the first theaters in which blacks and whites played on stage together". Kerz produced the Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht . Efforts of his parents to leave to live with relatives in the United States, failed after the start of World War II in 1939. After the father Nathan had died in January 1943 in The Hague, the mother were Nachuma and sister Charlotte in May 1943 by The Hague from Sobibor deported and murdered there.

Entry into the USA in 1941 and theater maker on Broadway

Leo Kerz, on the other hand, was able to travel to New York from South Africa in 1941 . Theater makers he knew from Berlin lived there now, such as Erwin Piscator , Bert Brecht, Kurt Weil and Ernst Josef Aufricht . Kerz worked again as a set designer and occasionally worked as a theater producer on Broadway . Kerz initially made his way as a house painter and window dresser. In 1942 he assisted the production designers Jo Mielziner and Stewart Chaney. In 1943/44 he taught at Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in New York. Kerz's first major work was to set up the Shakespeare play Antonius and Cleopatra at the Martin-Beck Theater in New York in 1947 . He was then set designer and technical director at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and in 1955/56 as “principal designer” at the San Francisco Opera and also acted as art director of the Columbia Broadcasting System . He designed the sets for the American premieres of Carl Orff's opera Der Mond and Frank Martin's opera Der Sturm .

Kerz achieved his greatest success in 1960 with the production of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros at the Longacre Theater in New York. He was both producer and set designer for this first performance of the Theater of the Absurd on Broadway, directed by Joseph Anthony . The “anti-Nazi play”, which can be understood as an “attack on collective hysteria and conformity”, was performed 250 times and Kerz received the “Outer Circle Award for the most creative overall production and the most impressive contribution to the Broadway” Season ".

Berlin 1962: Hochhuth's deputy and compensation

In 1962, Kerz lived in Berlin for almost a year and developed the set for the world premiere of Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy , which Pope Pius XII. accuses of not opposing the extermination of the Jews . Here he worked with Erwin Piscator , who had specially hired him from New York. When designing the set, Kerz did not rely on technical innovations, but set up a conventional peep-box stage that delimited the stage space on three sides so that the audience could see what was happening on the stage through the fourth imaginary wall. The upper wall to the ceiling was broken open. An oversized sculpture of the crucified Jesus peered down from the broken ceiling. The design of the props and costumes was naturalistically related to the respective figure and the location of the action. This applied to the papal cassock as well as to the SS uniform, be it for Kurt Gerstein's apartment, which was destroyed after a bombing, or for the Berlin nunciature . Kerz's wife at the time recalled: “For Leo, the rehearsal period was a painful process, especially when he was watching the German film material from the concentration camps that had been seized. It was a vortex that pulled him down. "

Kerz also used this stay to enforce claims for compensation due to the persecution of his family during the Nazi era. For example, because of the damage caused by the delay in his professional advancement, for which he received 30,000 DM, and the loss of his parents' clothing business, which they were forced to "squander" far below value due to the persecution. Here the compensation amount was 5000 DM.

Awards, Lifetime Achievement and Death 1976

Kerz received a number of prizes for his achievements, including a Goethe Prize (which cannot be further specified) in 1932, the New York Music Critics' Award in 1956 for the set design of Carlisle Floyd ’s Susannah and the Tony Award and Outer Circle Award for Rhinoceros Most Creative Overall Contribution to the Season (1961).

Kerz lived in New York until his death in 1976, but also traveled to Europe and gave lectures at the universities of Krakow and Warsaw . He has published essays on the building and design of plays, operas and films.

On the occasion of his death in 1976, the New York Times characterized him as a representative of the golden age of German theater, which together with other exiled artists had made an important contribution to the appearance of American theater.

literature

  • Petra T. Fritsche : Stumbling Blocks - The Memory of a Street . wvb, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86573-808-0 (also dissertation Freie Universität Berlin 2013)
  • Louise Kerz Hirschfeld: The Deputy… when theater history was made / Der Stellvertreter… a piece of theater history . In: The Bridge Journal. Newsletter of Elysium - between two continents / The Lahr von Leitis Academy & Archive . No. 2-2016, pp. 24-27
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933 = International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , Volume II / Part 1: A – K. Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , pp. 615f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 347f.
  2. ↑ a b c d Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933 = International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , Volume II / Part 1: A – K. Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , pp. 615f.
  3. ↑ Helmut Kindler: A party to say goodbye . Kindler, Munich 1992, p. 167.
  4. ↑ Helmut Kindler: A party to say goodbye . Kindler, Munich 1992, p. 169.
  5. ↑ Berno Bahro: Martha Jacob - "I have dedicated myself to the sport." In: Berno Bahro, Jutta Braun, Hans Joachim Teichler (Ed.): Forgotten records. Jewish athletes before and after 1933. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86650-038-9 , pp. 77-87, here pp. 83f.
  6. ↑ Louise Kerz in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  7. ↑ Louise Kerz Hirschfeld: The Deputy… when theater history was made / Der Stellvertreter… a piece of theater history . In: The Bridge Journal. Newsletter of Elysium - between two continents / The Lahr von Leitis Academy & Archive . No. 2–2016, pp. 24–27, here p. 26
  8. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 354.
  9. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 348f.
  10. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 349f.
  11. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 354.
  12. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 350.
  13. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 351f.
  14. ↑ Nadine Wickert: "Der Stellvertreter" and its implementation in theater and film. The political in Rolf Hochhuth's drama, Erwin Piscator's stage production and Constantin Costa-Gavras' film . Diplomica, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8428-9886-8 , p. 62.
  15. ↑ Louise Kerz Hirschfeld: The Deputy… when theater history was made / Der Stellvertreter… a piece of theater history . In: The Bridge Journal. Newsletter of Elysium - between two continents / The Lahr von Leitis Academy & Archive . No. 2–2016, pp. 24–27, here p. 27
  16. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 352f.
  17. ↑ Petra T. Fritsche: Stolpersteine ​​- The memory of a street . wvb, Berlin 2014, p. 354.
personal data
SURNAME Kerz, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American set designer and theater producer
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 4th November 1976
Place of death New York City